The multi-unit payroll week-close checklist

Why a checklist, not a person

In a lot of multi-unit operations, payroll lives in one person's head. That works until that person is out sick on payroll day.

A written checklist makes the close repeatable. It lets you hand pieces of it to other people, and it shows exactly where a given week is stuck.

It also changes the question you ask. Instead of "is payroll done?", you ask "which step is each store on?" The second question always has an answer.

The shape of the week

A week-close has five phases. Each store should finish one before it moves to the next:

1. Prep. Roster and rate changes are in before the week ends.
2. Clean. Timecards are corrected and managers sign off.
3. Cross-check. Hours and rates match between your time clock and your payroll provider.
4. Run. Import, review the register, and a person approves.
5. After. Find who was missed or short-paid, and fix it fast.

Phase 1: Prep (during the week)

Most payroll problems are created days earlier, when a roster change goes into one system and not another.

• New hires exist in your payroll provider, your time clock and your POS, with the same identifier linking them. A new hire who can clock in but has no payroll record won't get paid.
• Terminations have a last day entered, and the person is off future schedules.
• Rate changes have an effective date that matches the pay period you intend. A raise entered mid-week may split the week, or may not, depending on your payroll provider. Know which.
• People who work at two stores are set up so their hours land on the right location and, if you run separate payroll companies per store, the right company.

Phase 2: Clean (the first morning after the week ends)

Timecard exceptions

Work every store's exception list: open shifts, shifts auto-closed overnight, long breaks, missing breaks where your state requires them, overlapping shifts, and shifts nobody was scheduled for. The missed clock-outs guide covers the daily version of this, which makes this step much shorter.

Manager sign-off

Each store manager confirms their store's hours are right. Track it per store, with a time. A simple board showing which stores have posted and which haven't is far more useful than a group text asking who's done.

Set a cutoff and hold it

Pick a time after which timecard edits stop. Anything after cutoff is handled as a payroll adjustment, on purpose, with a note. Edits that slip in after hours are exported are the classic source of "but my timecard says…"

Phase 3: Cross-check

This is the step most operators skip, and the one that catches the most.

Hours, per person

Compare hours in your time clock to hours in the payroll import, per person, per store. Store totals can match while two people are wrong in opposite directions.

Rates

Compare each person's rate in payroll to their rate in your scheduling or labor system. A mismatch means one of them is wrong, and your labor reports and your paychecks are telling different stories.

People on one side only

Anyone with hours but no payroll record, or a payroll record with no hours when they did work, needs a look before the run, not after.

Pay types

Overtime, tips, bonuses, paid time off and cross-store hours each go wrong in their own way. Check each pay type that applies to your stores.

Phase 4: Run

• Import hours into your payroll provider.
• Review the register before anyone approves: total hours against the time clock, headcount against the active roster, anyone at zero, anyone unusually high, and anyone getting a paper check who expected direct deposit.
• A person approves. Software can prepare and cross-check payroll. Approving it should always be a named person who has read the review.

Phase 5: After the run

Within a day of the run, check for:

• Anyone who worked and wasn't paid
• Anyone paid short against their hours
• Direct deposit changes that fell back to a paper check
• The off-cycle list: who needs a correction check, for how much, and why

Fix these quickly. An employee who gets a correction the same week trusts the next paycheck. One who waits two weeks for it remembers.

The checklist

Common failure modes

• One late store holds every store. If you run payroll as one batch, decide in advance what happens when a store hasn't posted by cutoff.
• Store totals that match. Offsetting errors hide inside matching totals. Compare per person.
• Edits after export. Covered above, and still the most common one.
• A fix made in one place. A rate updated in payroll but not in scheduling will look wrong again next week.
• An identifier nobody mapped. If your systems link people by employee number, a new hire or rehire with a fresh number can drop out of the cross-check entirely. Confirm every active person matched on both sides.
• Approving from a summary. The total looked normal, so nobody opened the register.

What to measure

• Stores posted by cutoff, each week
• Timecard edits made after cutoff
• Cross-check mismatches found before the run, for hours and for rates
• Off-cycle checks per pay period, and the reason for each
• Time from week end to approval

For example, say most of your off-cycle checks keep coming from one store. That store's prep or sign-off step is where to look, not the payroll run itself.

Running it every week

Poros Ops runs this close for multi-unit operators. It tracks which stores have posted, runs the hours and rate cross-checks, flags people who exist on only one side, and audits the run afterward. It never approves payroll. That stays with you.