When you’re running payroll, what’s typically your biggest “day of” challenge?

James,

Can totally relate!  I think there is something about restaurant payrolls that is just frankly a PITA!

I currently do payroll for a restaurant that right now has 35 paychecks per pay-period.  But it's winter, and they are on the beach.  From May 1 to June 15 the payroll will swell from the 35 to about 105.

So.... here are my tips for making payroll more doable.

1.  BI-WEEKLY PAYROLL.  Having payroll occur on the same day every week allows you to schedule for it more easily.  Bonus for restaurants - Monday/Tuesdays tend to be slow.  Anti-bonus... they also tend to be management days off.

2. HAVE A FRIDAY PAYDATE.  Give yourself all the time you possibly can to get people in.

3.  DO OFF-WEEK RUN THROUGHS.  By reviewing stuff weekly *as if* you were going to do a payroll, a lot of the errors will be found before the big day.  Plus, you'll get an idea about how much your labor is running.

4.  DON'T COVER PAIN.  When i used to work in-house at a restaurant, and i found something wrong in the early AM, i had no problem calling the person who didn't clock out the night before, or the manager that forgot to approve hours.  No matter what time it was.  Enough said.

5.  DON'T COVER PAIN II.  It is a real pain to have to redo checks or supplement checks.  But if people repeatedly don't clock out, declare tips, etc etc. then there is something to be said for letting the errors go through, and making a whole production of the fix.  Making it extremely inconvenient to be repeatedly wrong tends to cut down on the wrong.

6. FACILITATE THE SIGNING.  Either get direct deposit, have a signature on file with the payroll company, or make sure that a signer is always there on payday.  Those are kind of the options.  If a signer is repeatedly not there, see #4 & 5.

7.  MAKE THINGS EASY.  Give people tools and procedures that allow them to record, catch and correct as they go along.  And connect those protocols to other things they are already in the habit of doing, like other closing procedures.  Plus give something back for their time  -- reflect back that yesterdays labor cost was high or low as a matter of course without cruising it first for errors and you'll find that errors don't make it past end of day much anymore.  Especially if incentives and kudos on this aspect of management performance are made to matter.

I think the key is making things easy to catch and correct as you go along, so that there isn't a ton of that on the day.  Even though we have such a big flux, and the payroll does take about 2 hours for me to do in summer, it's not a crazy bad time anymore because management and i have worked out the kinks for the most part.

Kristen

@Sangeethmathew,

Is there a good way to remind clients to always check for (and not skip) updates? 

I am prone to closing pesky notification bubbles ><.

@tamalita, having to balance two important recurring events in the same day sounds like a tough challenge! Why do critical tasks always happen on the same day? 

Were you often forced to prioritize one over the other? How did you navigate that?

That's a great list of changes, were you instrumental in all of them? Sounds like you had to negotiate a ton of moving parts, what a pro!

@Anonymous, I am both happy and sad that you can relate - because it means no one has solved this for the industry! 

I think every store I've worked in, without exception, has had payroll problems. There are just so many variables and details that are way too easy to overlook. I love #3, #4 and #5. I tried to double-check the numbers every other day so I could catch mistakes early and rectify them as they occurred (sort of). I also employed checklists to help my mushy "day of brain," which helped immensely. Then there are always those one offs - a few minutes missing on a paystub, a signature missed because someone called out, and then an oven explodes...

For #4 and #5, I ran into a conundrum which had more to do with our management team than the employees themselves (well, it was both). The head chef was semi-lax about lateness, he just wanted his people in the door and food on plates. Our GM was a stickler for the rules. 

There was a constant push and pull - if we came down too hard on new employees about rules, they had a tendency to abandon the job. We lived in a competitive high-cost area, so quickly finding employees in our pay range was a huge challenge. Having fewer employees meant more strain on the existing team. If we weren't strict, we'd make our boss mad. It was a challenge to be firm one way or the other knowing the outcomes - I just wanted our team to do good work... and do what they were supposed to do. 

#7, I ended up taking over payroll for another manager and created a clear set of protocols that anyone could just pick up and follow through with. Do you ever talk to your clients about doing that with their teams? How do you go about having that conversation without "stepping on toes"?

@john-pero, this is great insight - even as technology makes calculations and input easier and faster, there's always room for improvement.  

We used in-house accounting software that did just what you described - a warning came up whenever an employee went past 40 hours in a week which required one of us to key in an approval code. Then the real challenge presented itself - going to each employee, asking why they have overtime, asking their lead if the overtime as approved, then getting the employee to sign the time correction form for the overtime - all while everyone is slicing and dicing vegetables. There should be a digital way to handle things, but I remember something about labor protocols... 

Have you always been in agriculture?