Payroll that arrives ready to submit.
Not ready to check. The difference is several days of somebody's month, every month, forever.
Labor is the biggest controllable cost, and the last thing you see.
Scheduling lives in one system, the time clock in another, and payroll in a third that talks to neither. Managers approve hours from memory. Exceptions — overtime, shift differentials, a manager covering a shift — are handled by someone remembering the rule.
So labor as a percentage of revenue, the number that decides whether a location is viable, gets reconstructed by hand after the pay period has already closed. Every correction it suggests is retrospective. The overtime a Tuesday schedule change would have prevented is already paid.
Encode the rules once, then stop re-deciding them.
Most payroll pain is not arithmetic. It is that the pay rules live in people's heads and get re-interpreted every period. We write them down, encode them, and make the exceptions explicit.
Trace one period end to end
Follow a real pay period from clock-in to submitted file, recording every manual intervention.
Write down the rules
Overtime thresholds, differentials, break handling, the location-specific exceptions everyone knows but nobody documented.
Reconcile the sources
Schedule, clock and payroll matched per employee per period, with mismatches surfaced rather than silently resolved.
Close the loop early
Surface the labor position during the period, while a schedule change can still change the outcome.
One reconciled hours-to-payroll pipeline.
Scheduled hours, worked hours and pay rules reconciled per employee per period, with every exception flagged for a human rather than quietly averaged away. The output is a payroll file, and an audit trail explaining every number in it.
What changes once it holds.
- Payroll preparation stops consuming days. The manual reconstruction disappears; what remains is reviewing the exceptions the system flagged.
- Labor cost becomes visible during the period. Early enough that a schedule change can still act on it.
- Pay rules stop drifting between locations. Encoded once, applied identically, everywhere.
- Every figure is defensible. When an employee disputes a paycheck, the answer is traceable rather than reconstructed.
Where this has run.
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OpenAwaiting first named customer
This one has no case study yet.
The problem is real and repeatable, and we build for it — but we have not yet published a named engagement against it. When we do, it appears here.
Bring us the hard part.
Every one of these began as a diagnostic, not a deployment. If the problem above is yours, that is where we would start too.