Timesheet Audit Agent

Background

Union payroll is rule-heavy work. A contractor running crews under more than a dozen union agreements has to check every timecard entry against the rules of the local that governs that crew, and those agreements disagree on shift premiums, overtime, and how a shift is classified.

At roughly 3,000 entries a week, that review took one administrator most of a day, every week, immediately before the pay run.

Challenges

3,000 entries a week, checked by hand against more than a dozen union agreements.
Shift patterns were not on the timecard, so the reviewer had to work out which rules applied.
The audit sat immediately before payroll, so delays put the pay run at risk.
The rules were undocumented and lived with one person.

Results

~360 hours returned to the payroll team each year

3,000 timecard entries audited automatically every week

~$16k a year in recovered payroll admin cost

Solution

Axcend built an agent that runs the audit before anyone opens the timecard file, and returns only what needs a decision.

Reads the week’s entries and infers each employee’s shift pattern from the punches.
Applies the right local’s rules from a workbook payroll owns, so a contract change is an edit rather than a development request.
Posts the exceptions in Teams with the rule that flagged each one.

Payroll still makes every decision. The searching is simply finished before they start.

ENLARGEThe weekly audit summary, posted in Microsoft Teams. Click to enlarge.