Payroll errors are expensive in two ways. The direct cost is fixing them - reprocessing, issuing corrections, absorbing penalties. The indirect cost is trust: an employee paid incorrectly twice stops trusting the system and sometimes stops trusting the employer.

Most payroll errors do not originate in the payroll software. They start in the timesheet.

The manual payroll prep process

For a team of 15, manual payroll preparation takes 2 to 4 hours per pay run. The steps look like this: export timesheets from the scheduling or time-tracking system, paste the data into a spreadsheet, calculate overtime by hand using a formula that depends on the correct threshold being remembered, cross-reference against the published schedule to catch any discrepancies, identify the discrepancies (shift swaps that were not updated, a sick day clocked as a regular shift, a late start that was never adjusted), fix the discrepancies, then hand the corrected data to whoever processes payroll.

Each transfer between systems is a point where data can be corrupted, mistyped, or lost.

The three places errors concentrate

Overtime calculation is the most common failure point. The threshold varies by contract type, sector, and collective agreement. A manager running the calculation manually uses the wrong rate, applies it to the wrong hours, or forgets that the employee reached the threshold mid-week rather than at the end of it.

Shift swaps are the second. When two employees swap shifts informally, the schedule reflects the original assignment. The employee who covered gets paid for the wrong shift. The employee who gave the shift gets credit for hours they did not work.

The third is simple data entry. Hours typed from a paper timesheet or a screenshot carry typo risk. A 7.5-hour shift recorded as 75 hours has happened in payroll systems more than once.

The automated process

A time-tracking system that feeds payroll preparation replaces manual steps with a single export. The output contains actual hours per employee, overtime hours flagged and calculated against the correct threshold for each contract type, leave deducted from balances, and shift swap adjustments already reflected in the data.

The export formats that matter for integration are CSV, Excel, and direct API connections to payroll software. Xero, QuickBooks, DATEV, Sage, and ADP all accept structured payroll imports. The first integration takes time to configure. After that, each pay run takes 20 minutes instead of 3 hours.

The return on investment

For a 20-person team running fortnightly payroll, the maths are straightforward. Manual preparation: 3 hours per run, 26 runs per year, 78 hours per year. At €25 per hour for payroll admin time, that is €1,950 per year in labour alone - before accounting for any error correction costs.

Larger teams see proportionally larger savings. A 60-person operation running the same manual process spends closer to 8 hours per run, or 208 hours per year.

The compliance case is separate. An automated system creates an audit trail: who worked when, what rate applied, and what was paid. That trail matters when an employee raises a wage query or an inspector requests records.

Rezano exports payroll-ready data with hours, overtime, and leave calculations built in - connecting the schedule to the payslip without a manual step in between.