ROE, in plain English.

Five calendar days. That is the window Service Canada gives a Canadian employer to issue a Record of Employment after a layoff, a leave, or a termination. Miss it and the employee's Employment Insurance claim stalls. Not a minor paperwork item. A legal obligation with a hard deadline baked into the Employment Insurance Act.

What the ROE records.

The Record of Employment is the document Service Canada requires any time an employee's earnings are interrupted. The form captures two numbers that drive the Employment Insurance calculation: insurable hours and insurable earnings for the period in question. Those figures tell Service Canada whether the employee qualifies for EI and, if so, how much.

Why the earnings stopped matters as much as when. A layoff, a leave, and a termination each carry distinct implications for the employee's EI outcome. Getting that reason right protects both the employee's benefit calculation and the employer's compliance record.

Until the employer files the form, the employee's EI application sits on hold. The claim cannot move forward without it.

When the deadline starts.

The clock starts at the end of the pay period in which the interruption occurs, not the last day the employee worked. On a bi-weekly payroll that closes on Friday, a termination mid-week still ties to that Friday close. The Record of Employment is due within five calendar days of that date, by the following Wednesday. Calendar days, not business days: weekends and holidays count. On monthly or semi-monthly payrolls, the gap between last day worked and pay-period end can stretch to weeks, which means payroll teams cannot wait for the event itself to start preparing the form.

Mistakes that show up in audits.

• Using the last day worked as the trigger date. Service Canada measures the deadline from the end of the pay period, not the employee's final shift. On long pay cycles, this distinction can mean a week's difference between compliant and late.
• Missing the ROE on leave. Most payroll teams issue the form on terminations and forget that parental leave and illness-related interruptions carry the same five-day obligation. All three trigger the same Service Canada requirement.
• Disconnected time and payroll records. Insurable hours must be accurate. When time data lives in a separate system from payroll, the count requires manual reconciliation, and manual reconciliation introduces errors that reduce the employee's EI entitlement.
• Delay during high-volume separations. A layoff affecting multiple employees creates simultaneous ROE obligations. Without a system that generates each form from payroll data directly, teams miss the five-day window on the second and third departures while managing the first.

How Workzoom generates it.

Workzoom has run Canadian payroll since 2001, twenty-five years under the same family that built the system. It calculates insurable hours and insurable earnings on every pay run and generates the Service Canada-formatted Record of Employment for the employer to submit. County of Renfrew, an Ontario municipality, and Silvera for Seniors both run Canadian payroll on the platform.

One database connects HR, time, and payroll. One system, built that way from the start. Insurable hours come from the same records that drive scheduling and overtime. When HR records an interruption, payroll already holds the complete insurable-earnings history. No export step. No reconciliation across separate modules. The ROE generates from data that was already current before anyone opened the form. Because that data was never in another system to begin with.