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That quiet payroll error cost me $1,700 before I caught it
I run a small shop in Omaha with 8 people on staff. Around January I kept seeing our biweekly total creep up by a few hundred dollars, and I figured it was just overtime from a rush project. Then last Tuesday I actually checked the export file line by line instead of skimming the summary. One of my senior folks had been accidentally clocking out at 5:30 PM instead of 5:03 PM, and the system rounded that to a half hour each day. Over 3 months that added up to about $1,700 in overpayments. I wrote a little script to flag any clock out that lands within 7 minutes of a boundary, and now we catch it before payroll runs. Has anyone else had a silent payroll error that took way too long to spot because the numbers looked normal every time?
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paige_ross6712d ago
Ngl the part about checking the export line by line instead of skimming the summary is the real lesson here. Most payroll systems show you a total and a per person number, and if the per person number looks close to normal you just move on. But rounding errors hide in plain sight because they hit the same person the same way every pay period, so it never looks like a spike. Your 7 minute flag script is smart, and you can take it further by logging those near boundary punches to a little report that goes to whoever approves time. Then it is not just caught before payroll, it is caught the same week, and the employee gets told to fix their habit instead of you eating the cost. Do that for six months and you will probably find a couple more of these, because one person rounding wrong usually means someone else is too.
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