Best Practices for a Successful Payroll Week

Successful payroll is a key component to a successful staffing agency.  

Please reference the following best practices that lead to a successful payroll week – every week.


Employee Onboarding 

Accurate Employee setup including W4 elections, electronic payment setup, and personal information is imperative for accurate checks.   Please review your onboarding process with your Account Manager to explore efficiencies if you are struggling to get Employee records setup accurately and timely.  In addition to new employee onboarding, active employee Garnishment and Adjustment setup is required each week.

Goal: Complete all garnishment order and benefit adjustment setup for this week’s payroll each week by 10am Monday.


Assignment Setup 

Each week as your front office team recruits, it's imperative that they set up their TempWorks Assignments with the appropriate worksite, pay rates, bill rates, worker comp codes, supervisors, and start/end dates. This is critical to ensuring a successful payroll week. Inaccurate Assignment setup will result in missing timecards, manual entry for the payroll team, and an increased likelihood of check, invoice, tax, and worker comp financial inaccuracies. We encourage all TempWorks customers to set goals for Assignment QA each week, typically on Friday afternoons or first thing Monday mornings.

Goal: Payroll team create timecards for the open week creating an accurate list of Employees to be paid each week by 10am on Monday.


Electronic Time Approvals

TempWorks encourages all staffing agencies to use as much electronic time entry as possible.  WebCenter electronic timecards, Buzz Onsite timeclocks, and Timecard feeds from 3rd party vendor time clocks offer automation that saves time and increases accuracy of time entry.

Goal: Consult with your customers and onsite partners to have all electronic time keeping reviewed and completed each week by COB Monday.


Paper Timecard Collection and Organization

TempWorks offers the upload of PDF images and linking to each timecard with hours entered for seamless storage, email invoices with signed timecard attached capabilities, and retrievals for any Accounts Receivable needs through our Timecard Linking module.  Best practice would be to collect timecards and organize by Customer before scanning and linking while entering hours and balancing by Customer.

Goal: Collect all timecards each week, keying by customer as received, by COB Monday; key and proof all timecards each week by 10am Tuesday.


Payroll and Invoice Processing

Payroll and Invoicing preparation stated above allows for timely and accurate processing of checks and invoices on Tuesday afternoon.   Early processing leads to faster payment on invoices, savings on any live check shipments for distribution due to added days for delivery, and banking savings for lead time on ACH and Pay Card distribution.  

Goal: Post Payroll and Invoice transactions and distribute each week by COB Tuesday; Close week in TempWorks each week by 12pm Wednesday.


Week Close Activities

Week close activities include late payroll runs, tax deposits and filings, new hire reporting, benefit upload and reconciliations, garnishing authority payments, employee onboarding tasks, and employee offboarding tasks in preparation for the following week of Payroll.  

Goal: Week close activities completed each week by COB Thursday.


When you Require Payroll Assistance:

The Lone Oak Payroll Team works hard to ensure they are timely and accurate with your requests on needing checks voided, reversed, stop payment etc. For the team to act quickly we ask that you provide two or more of the below information to verify we are acting on the right request:

  • Employee Name or Employee ID
  • Check Number
  • Check Date
  • Amount
  • Screenshot from check register in Enterprise


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