Can payroll for shift work be automated?
By Andrija Drabić · Published
Yes. A program can take the monthly shift schedule and the hourly-rate sheet, work out hours, night and Sunday surcharges, holidays and overtime, and fill in the payroll workbook your accountant expects. For a security company, that cut the monthly payroll from about five working days by hand to two minutes.
Why payroll by hand is slow
Every month the office read scanned shift schedules and hand-computed hours, night and Sunday surcharges, holidays and overtime for a security workforce across dozens of sites. It took five working days, every month, and errors reached the accountant.
What the program does
A desktop app turns the monthly schedule and the hourly-rate sheet into the accountant's payroll workbook. Along the way it:
- walks every shift in 15-minute slices
- handles both daylight-saving nights
- applies 18 surcharge rates
- detects overtime against the monthly hour fund
- flags unknown employees or shift codes before anything is generated
- keeps a run history, with a dashboard, per-employee views and a monthly recap
How we know it's right
Results are cent-exact, verified against the accountant's reference sheets, and 646 automated tests check them.
No AI, no cloud
This job doesn't need AI: the payroll rules are known, so the program applies them exactly. It ships as a one-click Windows installer, with no server and no cloud, so payroll data stays on the office PC.
Who this fits
- You work in shifts, with several kinds of surcharges.
- Hours are copied from the schedule into a spreadsheet by hand.
- Your accountant expects a workbook in a set format.
- Payroll errors surface only when someone complains.