Case studies·Accuracy
Payroll that catches its own mistakes
The week's crew hours go in exactly as they were written. Payroll paperwork comes out ready to file, in the format the rules require. If a name on the hour log doesn't match an employee, the run stops and asks — so a misspelled nickname can't pay the wrong person.
RJ Bruno Inc.·Commercial plumbing contractor · Staten Island, NY
(est.)Hours saved are estimates based on how much work the system handles each week, not stopwatch measurements.
The problem
Every week, the crew's hours came in as a block of text: who worked which job on which day, with overtime noted — or not. Someone in the office retyped all of it into the payroll workbook, split each worker's hours into regular, overtime, and double-time, and built the report for filing by hand.
Every retyped line was a chance to get something wrong. A misspelled name could become the wrong person's pay. A weekend rule could be applied one way this week and another way next week. A worker could be left off the report entirely. The mistakes were small and quiet, and expensive to find after the fact.
What we built
The office pastes in the week's hours as-is. The system turns them into the filing. Here's what the office sees:
- It sorts the pasted text into dated lines for each crew, even when entries run together, spill onto a second line, or have notes in parentheses.
- It checks every name against the employee roster. If a name doesn't match an employee, it stops and asks. A person has to assign the name or leave it out on purpose. Nothing slips through quietly.
- It knows which workers are foremen and which are craft workers, so nobody has to remember who is who.
- It applies the weekend pay rules the same way every week. If the log says otherwise for a specific line, what's written wins.
- It totals each worker's hours by week, works out pay and deductions, and produces the payroll paperwork ready to file, in the format the rules require.
- If a worker has no pay information on file, it shows a warning at the top instead of quietly putting them down for zero.
What it means for the business
An estimated 80–218 hours a year (est.) back in the office, and a payroll run that stops and speaks up instead of quietly getting it wrong. The most expensive payroll mistake — paying the wrong person, or paying the right person the wrong amount — is now blocked at the exact spot where it used to happen.
Payroll, invoices, paystubs — that used to eat our week, and I always worried something would go out wrong. Now it runs on its own, it flags what it isn't sure about, and the sensitive stuff is locked down. I got my office back.
Have a process like this eating your week?
Tell us what it is. The first step is a working call — no prepared pitch, no commitment — to figure out whether it's the kind of repetitive, rule-following work that belongs in a system instead of on someone's desk.