Everybody likes getting paid for the hours they work. But at companies large and small, little snafus in how the hours are added up can lead to unfortunate consequences in paychecks.
This is why payroll managers everywhere take time to reconcile the number of hours worked by employees against what’s actually printed on paycheck stubs.
We encountered the importance of this recently when we met a particular payroll administrator at a company (actually a big non-profit that helps the disabled), who had a familiar problem: doing things manually (in her case comparing hours to pay stubs) takes a lot of time.
To accomplish this time-consuming task, she would set the pairing documents beside each other and flip through each set one-by-one comparing their numbers individually. This happened in batches of as many as 600 twice a month, plus smaller batches of weeklies. The total time consumed on this mundane but important task was about 5 hours a month.
You might think 5 hours a month is not a huge amount of time. After all, it’s only about one-half of a day’s work. ONE HALF A DAY’S WORK! Why spend one half a work day doing what could be done in a matter of minutes? Our PS crew jumped into action!
Writing a reconciliation report on payroll files in Document Locator to automate a digital comparison and speed up the review process was in order. Now, reconciliation is as easy as running the report and immediately viewing which items (if any) do not match. Items that don’t match can be quickly opened up and viewed in greater detail.
It’s that easy.
Of course this project took a little bit of skilled professional services to enact, but the payback is well worth it in the several hours saved each month.
