Timesheet to payroll without re-keying: what connected actually means

The fortnightly handover

Here is the pay run in a typical twelve-person business. Timesheets come in by photo, app or paper. Someone compares them against the roster and chases the gaps. They type the hours into the payroll tool, or export a CSV from the timesheet app and import it, then fix the rows the import rejected. They check allowances by eye. Then they run payroll and hope.

It takes most of a day, it falls on one person, and that person dreads it.

What it costs

• The day itself. Four to eight hours a fortnight, every fortnight, from someone who has other work.
• The errors. An hour typed as a ten, a Saturday loading missed, a shift paid twice. Each one is a conversation, a correction and, sometimes, a back-payment.
• The lag. Because hours only become visible at payroll, nobody sees that a job ran over until a fortnight after it did.
• The single point of failure. When that person is on leave, payroll is late.

What "integrated" usually means

Most tools that say they integrate with payroll mean one of three things:

1. Export and import. A file leaves one system and enters another. It still needs checking, and the two systems disagree the moment someone edits one.
2. A sync. Hours copy across on a schedule. Better, but it is still two copies, and the sync breaks quietly when a pay item is renamed.
3. A connector built by a third party. It works until either side updates.

All three leave a person responsible for noticing when the copies drift. That person is the integration.

What connected should mean

• One record. The time card the worker created is the record the pay run reads. There is no second copy.
• Approval is the handover. A manager approves the time card, and that approval is what makes it payable. No export step.
• The roster is the reference. Rostered versus worked is visible on the same screen, so the chasing happens during the fortnight, not at the end.
• The job gets the hours too. The same entry costs the job, so the lag disappears.
• History is kept. Who changed what, and when, is in the record.

In RovrDS the time card comes from clock-in in the Personal area, approval happens in Scheduling, and the Finance add-on runs the pay through Xero from the approved hours.

A checklist for your current setup

1. Does an hour get typed, exported or imported anywhere between clock-in and pay? Each one is a place it can go wrong.
2. Can a manager see rostered versus worked during the fortnight, or only at the end?
3. If the payroll person is away, can someone else run it from the same screen?
4. Does the hour that gets paid also land on the job it was worked on?
5. Can you see who changed a time card and when?

Five yeses and you are connected. Fewer, and the fortnightly day is the price.

Questions people ask