Talk about your business

James,

Can totally relate!  I think there is something about restaurant payrolls that is just frankly a PITA!

I currently do payroll for a restaurant that right now has 35 paychecks per pay-period.  But it's winter, and they are on the beach.  From May 1 to June 15 the payroll will swell from the 35 to about 105.

So.... here are my tips for making payroll more doable.

1.  BI-WEEKLY PAYROLL.  Having payroll occur on the same day every week allows you to schedule for it more easily.  Bonus for restaurants - Monday/Tuesdays tend to be slow.  Anti-bonus... they also tend to be management days off.

2. HAVE A FRIDAY PAYDATE.  Give yourself all the time you possibly can to get people in.

3.  DO OFF-WEEK RUN THROUGHS.  By reviewing stuff weekly *as if* you were going to do a payroll, a lot of the errors will be found before the big day.  Plus, you'll get an idea about how much your labor is running.

4.  DON'T COVER PAIN.  When i used to work in-house at a restaurant, and i found something wrong in the early AM, i had no problem calling the person who didn't clock out the night before, or the manager that forgot to approve hours.  No matter what time it was.  Enough said.

5.  DON'T COVER PAIN II.  It is a real pain to have to redo checks or supplement checks.  But if people repeatedly don't clock out, declare tips, etc etc. then there is something to be said for letting the errors go through, and making a whole production of the fix.  Making it extremely inconvenient to be repeatedly wrong tends to cut down on the wrong.

6. FACILITATE THE SIGNING.  Either get direct deposit, have a signature on file with the payroll company, or make sure that a signer is always there on payday.  Those are kind of the options.  If a signer is repeatedly not there, see #4 & 5.

7.  MAKE THINGS EASY.  Give people tools and procedures that allow them to record, catch and correct as they go along.  And connect those protocols to other things they are already in the habit of doing, like other closing procedures.  Plus give something back for their time  -- reflect back that yesterdays labor cost was high or low as a matter of course without cruising it first for errors and you'll find that errors don't make it past end of day much anymore.  Especially if incentives and kudos on this aspect of management performance are made to matter.

I think the key is making things easy to catch and correct as you go along, so that there isn't a ton of that on the day.  Even though we have such a big flux, and the payroll does take about 2 hours for me to do in summer, it's not a crazy bad time anymore because management and i have worked out the kinks for the most part.

Kristen