Time capture & payroll prep

The timesheet that arrives as a photo of a piece of paper

Payroll week is a manual reconciliation exercise, every week.

Hours, overtime, allowances and absence — captured at the point of work and validated automatically, so payroll preparation stops being a weekly transcription project.

How it runs today

You will recognise at least three of these.

  • Hours are written on paper, texted, or typed into a spreadsheet at the end of the week.
  • Someone transcribes them into payroll, applying overtime and allowance rules by memory.
  • Disputes are settled by whoever sounds more confident, because there is no record.
  • Absence, holiday and sickness are tracked in a different place again.
  • Hours are recorded against a week, not against the jobs the hours were spent on.
The tells

Signals it is costing more than anyone has measured.

  • Payroll preparation consumes one or two full days every cycle.
  • You routinely pay for hours you cannot attribute to any job.
  • Overtime and allowance errors are found by employees rather than by you.
  • Holiday entitlement questions require a spreadsheet consultation.
  • Labour cost per job is an estimate because the underlying hours were never captured that way.
Rebuilt from the ground up

What it becomes.

Time is captured where the work happens — clock in and out on a phone, against a job, with location where that is proportionate and disclosed. Rules that currently live in someone's head become explicit and get applied automatically: overtime thresholds, shift premiums, travel time, standby, allowances. Anomalies surface for review before payroll rather than after: a missing clock-out, a shift longer than policy allows, a mismatch between hours booked and jobs completed. Payroll preparation becomes an approval of a prepared file rather than a transcription exercise, and because hours were captured against jobs, labour cost lands in job costing for free.

What the system does

  • Mobile clock-in and clock-out against a job, working offline
  • Automatic application of overtime, premium, travel and allowance rules
  • Exception review before payroll — missing punches, overlong shifts, anomalies
  • Absence, holiday and entitlement in the same record as attendance
  • A payroll-ready export, approved rather than re-typed

What it connects to

  • Your payroll provider or bureau, as a validated file rather than manual entry
  • Job costing, which gains real labour cost automatically
  • Scheduling, so planned versus actual hours can be compared
  • HR records, for entitlement and contracted hours

It augments the systems of record you already run. Nobody is asking you to replace your accounting package.

The first release

Where we would start, and how long it takes.

Mobile time capture with your overtime and allowance rules applied, plus the exception review, for one crew or site — about a week. We run it in parallel with the existing method for one full pay cycle before anyone relies on it, because payroll is the wrong place to discover an edge case.

Others in finance

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