Now We Have Kronos Timekeeper, It's Payroll Time! Part I

You are a payroll manager who has recently learned that the parent company is requiring you to use Kronos Workforce Timekeeper. They have been on the system for years, however, they are now requiring all of the satellite businesses to implement it as well. I can’t get into the detail, but I will review the basic steps required. As an overreaching policy for all of these steps, make sure you are as accurate as possible, and that you completely finish one step before starting another. In this first of two entries, we start to understand how Workforce Timekeeper fits into your payroll process. 

Step One – Get your managers together! A large part of processing payroll is making sure your employees record their time properly, and when they don’t, that their managers fix it and approve it in a timely fashion. Some organizations required the employees AND managers approve their time cards in Workforce Timekeeper. That’s a good thing because accountability is given to the employee. It’s a challenge because there is another layer of approval, requiring more time and often, more effort.   Remember that one of the reasons you implemented Kronos was to speed the collection and classification of time for payroll processing!

Step Two – Shut the door and lock it!  Now that your managers have reviewed and approved their time in Kronos, you sign off the previous pay period. Your sign off in Workforce Timekeeper is for the entire pay period, or if you haven’t signed off in the past, for all time data up until the end of the most recent time period. You will never sign off anything more recent that he previous pay period, but you will sign off all un-signed off data up until the close of the previous pay period. Remember, this is automatic Workforce Timekeeper, once you choose to sign off, it just happens in this manner. One more thing to mention; you may have a sign off restriction configured. Sign off restrictions were designed in Workforce Timekeeper to block sign off if certain conditions exist, for example, missed punches. If there are any missed punches within the timeframe of the sign off, Kronos will give you an error message noting the exception(s) that are present, and won't allow the sign off.

The missed punch sign off condition is very common; you probably have that condition in your application. Other conditions are unexcused absences and having zero hours in a certain pay code. The unexcused absences condition is pretty clear; if you have unexcused absence on a timecard, that timecard can’t be signed off. The last condition is interesting. Zero hours in a pay code is used by organizations to find employees that haven’t charged hours to their regular (Reg, Base, etc pay codes) or a PTO (Personal, sick, vacation, holiday) pay code for the pay period. This is configured using a feature called combination pay codes.  Several pay codes are grouped together and given a name. For example, if tracking overtime needs to be simplified, an organization can group every type of overtime pay code together into the “All OT” combined pay code; enabling them to have one lump sum showing representing all the overtime pay codes.

Part II will be coming soon, so check back!