Why employees don't get paid

The two biggest issues we face in payroll are:

1. Being advised of New Employees and/or changes to existing Employees on the day we need to process your payroll.
2. Timesheet Creep - where we keep getting late items or having to re-run timesheet exports repeatedly.

New Employees and Maintenance

The most critical step in payroll is getting new employees set up correctly and/or making amendments to existing employees, as getting this wrong means their pay is wrong, leave may be wrong and all sorts of other issues materialize.

Getting this right is so important to us that we double-check every new employee setup so when we get new setups on payday it puts us under enormous pressure as someone else has to be pulled from processing payrolls to check.

The solution to this is, PLEASE SEND US EMPLOYEE SETUPS AND MAINTENANCE WELL IN ADVANCE OF YOUR SCHEDULED PAYMENT DATE. When you hire a new employee, send us the Employee Setup form as soon as it is complete, the same with any changes. Give yourself a deadline for accepting changes and stick to it, if someone does not get paid because they did not provide you the required information on time, just accept it. They will get paid in the next pay run.

Once the Timesheet comes to us, everything else should have been completed in advance so that on Pay Day all we are doing is processing the pay.

Timesheet Creep

This is the next big issue we regularly face with messages like;

• Mary was late getting her Timesheet to us
• John forgot to add his leave
• We always have to chase Tim to get his expenses
• Is it too late to add this one item, etc etc etc

All of these mean we have to start the payroll process from the beginning, re-run Export files from Ezytime, import the files, process the pay, review reports, resend reports, and in extreme cases cancel DC files sent to the bank.

It is caused by the employee's poor time management and is allowed to happen because you accept it.

Simple solutions are:

1. Set a Hard Deadline for Timesheets, if something comes late, then they miss out
2. Don't let one employee create a situation that could jeopardize the payroll for everyone else
3. To change their behavior you need to stick to your deadlines
4. If they insist they need to be paid, run it as a One-Off Pay on the basis the employee agrees to the One-Off Pay fee being deducted from their pay (just use our Deduction Form). This approach is guaranteed to change behavior and ensure deadlines are adhered to in the future.