Five to a hundred employees, hours in one app, tips in another and the run built in a spreadsheet twice a month.
Payroll landed on your desk along with everything else, and every period means chasing managers for timesheets.
Fifty to five hundred employees, a preview register to check line by line and a journal to post by department.
Restaurant groups, retail, clinics, construction, logistics — and the firms that run payroll for several of them.
Numbers from the EY payroll survey, APQC benchmarking and small-business payroll statistics — most errors start in time and attendance, and each one is expensive.
payrolls in the US contains an error, and each error costs $291 on average.
EY survey, via Paycom ↗of work a year is what a 1,000-employee company spends fixing its most common payroll errors.
EY survey, via Paycom ↗time, attendance and expense errors per 1,000 employees a year — around $250,000 in cost.
EY survey, via Paycom ↗median total cost of the payroll process per employee, counting time reporting, pay management and payroll taxes.
APQC Open Standards Benchmarking ↗payroll penalties issued by the IRS in a single year, worth $13.7 billion.
IRS Data Book, via NetSuite ↗a month spent on payroll administration by a third of small businesses.
NSBA, via NetSuite ↗Put your monthly volume into the calculator and see hours and dollars.
Payroll automation is a workflow that does the manual part of every pay period on its own: pulling hours from the time clock, chasing missing punches and unapproved overtime, collecting tips and commissions from the POS and CRM, applying employee changes, checking the run against last period and posting the journal to the books. Gusto, ADP or Paychex calculate the taxes and pay the people; the hours before that — the spreadsheet, the emails to managers, the line-by-line review — are what automated payroll removes.
We build it around the payroll provider and the time-tracking system you already use rather than a new platform. Two days before the deadline, the workflow reads Deputy, Homebase or QuickBooks Time, lists what each manager needs to fix and keeps reminding until the cut-off. Tips from Toast or Square and commissions from HubSpot go into the pay file by your rules. Code compares the preview with last period and a language model explains each flagged line in plain words. The owner or controller approves, the run is submitted to Gusto, ADP or QuickBooks Payroll, and the journal is posted to QuickBooks Online, Xero or NetSuite by department.
Missing punches are fixed before the deadline instead of as off-cycle corrections afterwards, every anomaly is explained before anyone approves, and the journal posts itself. People keep the approval, the exceptions and the classification decisions, so automation of payroll never means losing control of what anyone is paid.
The run path of one pay period. Hours and variable pay come in on their own; the run is checked, explained and submitted only after a person signs it off.
Fires on the schedule two days before the payroll deadline, for each entity and pay group.
Reads approved and unapproved hours from Deputy, Homebase, When I Work or QuickBooks Time through the API.
Missed clock-outs, unapproved overtime and break violations are listed per manager; clean timesheets go straight on.
Sends each manager their list in Slack or SMS, checks again every few hours and escalates to the owner before the cut-off.
Pulls tips from Toast or Square and commissions and bonuses from HubSpot or Salesforce, calculated by your rules.
Takes new hires, terminations, rate changes, W-4 updates and benefit elections from BambooHR or the HRIS and applies them to the pay file.
Assembles hours, overtime, PTO, tips, commissions and deductions per employee in the format your payroll provider imports.
Flags anything off: pay up or down beyond your threshold, duplicate payments, negative amounts, a terminated employee still being paid.
Writes a plain-language note for each flag — what changed and why it probably did — so the review takes minutes, not an afternoon.
Posts the preview totals and the flagged lines to Slack or email for the controller or owner.
Nothing is submitted without a person’s explicit approval; a rejected run goes back with the corrections requested.
Sends the approved file to Gusto, ADP, Paychex or QuickBooks Payroll by API or import and confirms the totals back.
Posts the payroll journal to QuickBooks Online, Xero or NetSuite, split by department, project or class with your account mapping.
Answers an employee’s question about their own pay stub in Slack or Teams from their data only, and hands anything else to HR.
Typical minutes per employee per month for the payroll person, managers and the bookkeeper together. Your own numbers go into the calculator below.
Based on 29 min by hand and 3 min with the flow per item, from the table above.
The flow pulls, builds, checks and posts. People keep every decision that changes what someone is paid.
The owner or CFO approves every payroll before it is submitted — money never moves on its own.
Retro pay, advances, garnishments and final pay on termination are decided by a person and only then entered.
Employee or contractor, exempt or non-exempt — a legal judgement, not a rule in a workflow.
Changes are made by HR or the owner; the flow applies them and shows the effect.
The manager and the employee settle them; the flow only shows the record.
Responses to the IRS or a state agency and corrections of filed returns stay with your accountant.
Flip a switch to hand a step to the flow or take it back.
Benchmarks from the EY payroll survey and APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking: a run with no missing punches, every anomaly explained before approval, and a journal that posts itself.
We map the process as it runs today, count the minutes and agree what the flow must never do on its own.
A working flow on your real data, in a sandbox. You see every run and every exception.
Edge cases, approvals and alerts, then the switch-over — with the old way kept as a fallback.
Monitoring, fixes when a vendor changes a format, and a monthly report of hours saved.
They calculate taxes and pay people well. What they do not do is collect the hours from your time clock and the tips from your POS, check the run against last period or post the journal by department. Payroll automation fills that gap around the provider you already have.
Yes. Deputy, Homebase, When I Work and QuickBooks Time have APIs for hours, Toast and Square for tips, and the pay file is built in the format Gusto, ADP or Paychex import — nobody copies a spreadsheet.
They never leave your payroll provider and HRIS. The workflow carries employee IDs, hours and amounts, runs in your own cloud or server, and uses scoped API keys you can revoke. A language model sees anomaly notes and pay-stub questions, not bank accounts.
You do. The flow prepares the run and the anomaly report; the owner, CFO or controller approves it, and only then is it submitted. A rejected run comes back with the corrections requested.
Yes. After the run is confirmed, the journal is posted to QuickBooks Online, Xero or NetSuite with your account mapping, split by department, project or class, and your bookkeeper reconciles instead of retyping.
Every node retries and then alerts us and you, and the flow starts two days before the deadline so there is time. The pay file is also saved in the provider’s import format, so the run can always be submitted by hand.
Put your headcount into the calculator above. The hours are in timesheet chasing and anomaly checking, and the bigger saving is usually the errors that never happen — each one costs real money and trust.
Describe it in two sentences — we reply within a day with a workflow sketch.
hello@wireclad.com →