Payroll processing, in plain English.

It is 10am on a Thursday and someone in finance is copying hours from the time system into Excel, then pasting them into a separate payroll tool. The file looks right. It usually does. Tuesday's termination is not in the export. The overtime from the long-weekend crew is still flagged as unapproved. And the new hire who started Monday has no rate in the payroll tool yet. Nobody knows any of this until the pay stubs go out.

Payroll processing is the discipline of catching all three before disbursement.

What payroll processing covers.

Payroll processing is the full cycle that converts approved time records, compensation changes, and employment events into confirmed pay for a given period. It ends when three outputs are in hand: pay stubs for employees, the EFT bank file for disbursement, and the journal entry that posts wages and deductions to the general ledger.

Every calculation between input and output depends on what goes in at the start. Tax deductions, statutory contributions, overtime premiums: all are functions of the incoming data. Bad inputs produce bad outputs with perfect arithmetic.

The three-step structure.

A structured pay run has three gates, and the sequence matters.

Validate first. Before any number is touched, the system confirms that all inputs are approved and current: timesheets, salary changes, new hires who joined this period, and terminations whose final pay needs calculating. Anything unapproved or missing at this gate produces either an error or a silent omission. Both cost money.

Then calculate. With confirmed inputs, taxes and statutory deductions run. The logic has to match the current period's rates and ceilings. A payroll engine carrying last year's thresholds will calculate wrong and keep going, quietly, until someone reconciles the remittance.

Then disburse. Three artifacts come out: the EFT bank file, pay stubs for employees, and the GL journal entry that records wages, deductions, and employer costs. Remittance extracts and year-end forms, including T4s for Canadian employees, are generated from the same run.

Where audits find problems.

• Running on unapproved timesheets. Payroll that starts before time is approved locks in whatever hours are in the system. Corrections mean retroactive adjustments or reversals, both requiring explanation and a paper trail payroll would rather not have.
• Re-keying between systems. When the time system and payroll software are separate, someone moves data between them manually. That introduces transcription errors: a wrong rate, a missed shift, a name entered differently enough to create a duplicate record.
• Terminations still on the active roster. A terminated employee left in the payroll file gets paid. The fix is that the termination event in HR removes the employee from active payroll before the run, not after.
• Journal entries that do not reconcile. The GL entry has to match the gross pay, deductions, and employer costs in the pay run exactly. Small differences accumulate across periods and surface at year-end, when they are harder and slower to fix.

How Workzoom runs it.

Workzoom runs payroll as a three-step guided pay run: validate, calculate, disburse. The approved timesheets, salary changes, new hires, and terminations at step one come from the same employee record that HR and time management already use. No export. No import. One database, one record.

This is how a family-owned business built the platform from day one in 2001, with the founder still running it: all-in-one on one database, not bolted together by acquisition. County of Renfrew and Silvera for Seniors run full payroll cycles through it. Cable Bahamas runs it with NIB calculated natively, not approximated by a US payroll engine with a different flag.

At step three, Workzoom generates the EFT bank file, employee pay stubs, the GL journal entry, remittance extracts, and T4s. The client or their bank submits and remits. That boundary has been clear for 25 years and it matters. Workzoom is the engine. The client acts on what it produces.