Nobody sets out to pay the wrong hours. It happens at the gate, on a night shift, or on a Monday when somebody's badge did not read. Here is where it starts and how to stop it before the payroll run.
The argument nobody wins
Every plant has the same Friday. Somebody comes to the office and says his hours are wrong. The supervisor is fairly sure he came in at six. The sheet says half past seven. The reader has nothing at all, because the man was out at the gate for a delivery and came in through the side door.
Nobody is lying. There is simply no record anybody trusts, so it gets settled by whoever remembers hardest, and then it gets settled all over again next month.
That is the real cost of loose attendance. Not the money on any one payslip, but the hours your supervisors and your office spend every single cycle arguing about numbers that should never have been in doubt.
Where the hours actually go wrong
It is nearly always the same handful of places.
The gate. Agency and contract staff sign in differently to your own people, often in a paper book, and their hours arrive last and get checked least.
Midnight. A shift starting at ten at night and ending at six in the morning belongs partly to one day and partly to the next. Split it the wrong way and somebody is short, or somebody is on overtime who should not be.
The missed punch. A reader that did not beep, a glove, a queue at shift change, a man who went straight to a breakdown. One missed punch becomes a whole shift typed in from memory three days later.
Overtime rules nobody has written down. After eight hours in the day, or after forty in the week, or only when a supervisor approved it beforehand. If three people in your business would answer that question three different ways, your payroll is already inconsistent.
The last-minute swap. Two men swap a shift on the Tuesday and tell each other. The sheet says nothing.
Why fixing it after the run costs so much more
Before the run, a wrong hour is one question to a supervisor, answered on the spot.
After the run it is a correction, a payslip somebody has to explain, and an adjustment carried into next month. Your accounts have already taken those figures, so they have to be put right as well. Worse, you now have a man who checks every payslip from here on, because he no longer quite trusts them. Then the story goes round the floor and three more people turn up at the office.
It is the same work either way. It is just enormously cheaper on the Wednesday than on the following Tuesday.
Get the hour right at the gate
The single biggest improvement is capturing the hour at the moment it happens, in a way nobody can fill in afterwards from memory. A fingerprint or face reader on the door, and a check-in on a phone for drivers and anyone working away, each one tied to the person and to the shift they are actually on that day.
Two things follow. Nobody clocks in on behalf of anybody else. And the hour on the record is the hour that happened, rather than the hour somebody reconstructed on the Thursday.
Write the shift rules down once
Your shift patterns, break deductions, overtime thresholds and the way a night shift is split across midnight all need writing down once and applying the same way every time. Not held in the head of the one person in the office who has been there fifteen years and is due to retire.
Most plants skip this part, and it is the part that quietly costs the most, because from the floor an inconsistency looks exactly like unfairness.
Show a supervisor only the odd ones
Nobody is going to re-read four hundred lines of timesheet, so do not ask them to. They get the ones that look wrong instead: a clock-in with no clock-out, a double scan a second apart, a twelve-hour shift where the pattern says eight, a man marked present at two sites on the same afternoon.
The supervisor looks at those, says what actually happened, and approves. A short review once a week, and everything else was already right. That is the whole change. You stop checking everything and start checking only what does not fit.
One clean file, not fourteen spreadsheets
Once hours are approved they should go to payroll in one go, with overtime already worked out, rather than being retyped by somebody at eight in the evening on the last day of the month.
Retyping is not simply slow. It is a second place for mistakes to get in, after you have gone to the trouble of closing the first one. We built exactly this for three factories: it cut their timesheet paperwork by 90%, and it took three weeks.
“Our shifts are too complicated for that”
We hear this on nearly every call, usually from a plant running four patterns, a night shift, agency labour and a rota that changes over the summer. That is complicated. It is not unusual, and it is not a reason to stay on paper. It is the reason paper is failing.
One thing we would say plainly, though. Do not change how the plant runs to suit the software. Anything that fights the way a floor really works gets worked around inside a fortnight, the supervisor starts keeping a quiet spreadsheet again, and you are back where you started while still paying for it.
What doing nothing costs
Days of office time every cycle. Overtime paid that nobody actually approved. A supervisor spending his Friday on payroll instead of on the line. And a slow loss of trust that turns up in ways nobody puts on a spreadsheet: people checking payslips, people reluctant to cover a shift, people who believe the numbers are decided rather than counted.
None of that ever appears as a line item, which is exactly why it survives for years.
In short
Catch the hour when it happens. Write the rules down once. Show a supervisor only what looks wrong, before the run rather than after it. Send payroll one clean file. We have ready-built attendance software, OpsDeck, that does this, we fit it to your shifts and your gate, and we keep it running for you afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
What causes most payroll errors in a factory?
Most payroll errors in a factory come from the same few places: agency staff signing a paper book at the gate, night shifts split the wrong way across midnight, a missed punch typed in from memory days later, overtime rules nobody has written down, and shift swaps that never reach the sheet.
Why is it cheaper to fix a wrong hour before the payroll run?
Before the run, a wrong hour is one question to a supervisor, answered on the spot. After the run it becomes a correction, a payslip somebody has to explain, an adjustment carried into next month, figures your accounts must put right, and a worker who now checks every payslip.
Do supervisors need to check every line of the timesheet?
No. Show supervisors only the entries that look wrong, such as a clock-in with no clock-out, a double scan a second apart, a twelve-hour shift where the pattern says eight, or somebody marked present at two sites on the same afternoon, and a short review once a week is enough.
Infoloop team
Manufacturing
The people at Infoloop who build and run the software described here: engineers, designers and the team that stays after launch.