Continual improvement

With my new payroll system project at work, I have now completed two payroll cycles, and all of the workers have been paid accurately and on time.

I have been surprised at the low number of pay enquiries that have come as a result of the new payroll system. And none of the pay issues relates to the system getting their pay wrong. The problems are usually associated with a mistake by the worker, not the system.

As we employ shift workers, once a shift is paid, we then need to invoice for that work, so the amount of hours we are invoicing must reconcile with the number of hours we have delivered. If they don't match, then we need to find out why. We had a mismatch today, and I spent almost three hours working out why the invoice hours wouldn't reconcile.

In the end, it came down to the incorrect coding of leave shifts. I hadn't put sufficient effort into reconciling the leave shifts before doing the payroll. As a result, it is now showing up as a problem for invoicing.

I eventually worked out the difference and was able to get the invoicing completed, but not without a lot of head-scratching. Now that I know the issue, I can improve our process to ensure it doesn't happen again.