From time entries to payroll data: checks before transfer

Payroll needs more than a monthly total. The recipient needs to know whose hours they are, which dates they belong to and what each row means. Start with a practical question: what data can you process? Ask for a file specification or an accepted sample and review it with the person responsible for time tracking. The legal references in this guide concern Finland.

Decide where hours are interpreted

A time tracking system may supply actual start and end times for payroll to interpret, or a ready breakdown of hours, days and allowance quantities. That division of work affects both settings and checks. If both systems add the same evening allowance, a technically valid file can still be wrong.

Record which system handles regular hours, additional work and overtime, absences and allowances. Name the person who updates the interpretation when employment terms change. For example, record which system calculates the evening allowance and who checks it.

Section 32 of the Working Time Act concerns the employer’s working time records, including hours worked and compensation paid. A payroll transfer is one part of that information flow. Establish where you can later obtain complete working time records when hours and compensation are held in different systems.

Review these fields with payroll

Decimal hours and clock times are easy to confuse. A quantity of 7.30 decimal hours means 7 hours 18 minutes. Half an hour is 0.5 hours. Check one row before attempting a larger trial transfer.

Example: one day, two allocations

The following data is fictional. The row labels describe their meaning; the receiving system’s actual codes must be checked separately.

The day totals 7.5 working hours. Five project hours and 2.5 internal hours are parts of the same day. If the transfer format also requires a daily total, agree on its role: treating it as another row to be added would double the quantity.

Check allowance units in the same way. An evening allowance row for two working hours may provide a compensation basis without increasing total hours worked. This distinction belongs in the receiving system’s field specification and the trial data checks.

The final checks in a pay period

Set deadlines for employees to complete entries, managers to approve them and payroll to receive the data. Leave time between those steps to resolve missing information. During implementation, include the schedule in your shared responsibilities.

The reviewer first resolves missing days and unclear entries, then compares the data with approved entries by employee and hour category. Include people who joined or left during the period. Absences need the agreed type and duration; detailed health information follows its own handling procedure.

Locking the period is a checkpoint in your process. Some systems lock before delivery, others after receipt. Agree on an order that allows delivery and the controlled handling of late corrections. Keep the batch identifier, selection, reviewer and delivery result.

Investigate an interrupted transfer before sending again

If a connection drops, some rows may already have arrived. Check with the recipient which employees and dates were imported. An error in the sending system does not describe the entire situation at the receiving end.

Next, establish what a new delivery does. One connection replaces an employee’s daily data, another adds rows, and a third recognises previously received rows. A replacement may also change corrections made at the receiving end; an additional import may duplicate hours. Choose the retry method once its effect is understood.

If an entry error is discovered later, correct the source and send payroll the agreed correction. Preserve the link to the original day and batch. Finally, verify that the correction appears in the receiving data too.

Checklist: before delivering payroll data

• The recipient’s fields, identifiers, codes and units have been tried with sample data.
• Calculation responsibilities between time tracking and payroll are documented.
• Missing entries and approvals are resolved, including those of new starters and leavers.
• Quantities per employee and hour category reconcile with the source.
• The batch period, identifier and reviewer are recorded.
• A receipt reviewer and a procedure for partial transfers are agreed.
• Everyone involved knows how late corrections and period locking are handled.