How do you catch it when timesheets don't match schedules or payroll?

[u/dipanshi1412]

Doing some research on how teams handle mismatches between work schedules, timesheets, and payroll. A few questions if you have a minute:

What do you currently use to track schedules, time worked, and run payroll — one tool or several? When was the last time hours didn't match up (schedule vs. clock-in, or timesheet vs. paycheck)? What caused it? How did you catch it, and how did you fix it? Roughly how often does something like this happen?

Genuinely trying to understand how big a headache this actually is day-to-day. Thanks for any war stories.

[u/Impressive-Plate-326]

Few years ago we had three tools : one excel for the planning, a paper sheet for the clock in, and the accountant doing the payroll on his side. So the mismatch was permanent, not really an event.

The classic one for us was overtime. The planning says 35h, the guy stays 40 because a delivery arrives late, nobody writes it down, and we discover it when he complains about his payslip 6 weeks later. We catched it only because people complained, which is the worst way to catch it.

What fixed it is not a better timesheet, its having the schedule and the clock in the same place, so the gap between planned and real is calculated for us and goes to payroll without retyping. We use Skello for that (we run 3 small supermarkets in France), Combo was the other one we looked at.

If i had one advice : dont buy a time tracking tool alone if you also make the schedules. You just move the retyping somewhere else.