Payroll and time attendance
What people were actually paid, and what hours produced that payment.
01 What it holds
The data inside it
Gross-to-net payroll results, hours by type, overtime, premiums, absence occurrences and the shift patterns behind them.
Payroll result, Wage type, Time entry, Shift, Absence occurrence, Cost centre allocation
02 Getting the data out
Extraction, and the keys that decide whether it joins
Provider files and APIs, usually per pay period and per country. Retrospective corrections are normal, so any extract must handle restatement of closed periods.
Employee identifiers differ between payroll provider and HRIS, especially where payroll is outsourced per country. Cost centre allocation may exist only here.
03 What goes wrong
The failures that look like success
Each of these produces a number that is plausible, reconciles to something, and is wrong. They are worth reading before the first extract, not after the first dispute.
Retrospective adjustments
A closed period can change. Pipelines that assume immutability produce a labour cost that stops matching the ledger.
Wage type sprawl
Hundreds of wage types encode premiums, allowances and deductions. Grouping them is a business decision that has to be governed once.
Multi-country fragmentation
Different providers, calendars and rules per country, so group-level labour cost needs a mapping layer.
Overtime buried in the total
Premium hours are the operational signal. Reported inside a single labour line, they become invisible to the people who could prevent them.
04 Joins that matter
What this system is worth joining to
| Join to | What it lets you answer |
|---|---|
| HRIS | paid population against establishment, and the gap between them |
| Rostering or MES | hours paid against hours planned and output produced |
| ERP | labour into product, project or contract cost |
05 Metrics it feeds
The numbers that come out of it
06 Questions
Frequently asked
Should labour analysis use payroll or HRIS?
Both, and the difference between them is the finding. HRIS says who should have worked; payroll says what was actually paid. Overtime, agency and absence cover live in the gap.
What is the most useful derived measure here?
Premium hours as a share of standard hours, by team and shift. It predicts both cost overrun and attrition earlier than any engagement survey.
Connect this system without replacing it
SCIKIQ reads it in place, resolves the entities inside it and governs what the fields mean.