We know that conducting payroll can be one of the most tedious and time-consuming processes for organizations. At Connecteam, we have made it our mission to simplify that process and make it as quick and easy as possible so that you can focus your efforts on what matters the most. In this help center article, we will walk you through the key steps to conduct payroll properly and show you how you can save time by implementing a proper payroll process. The steps are the following:

Set your payroll period
Set payroll reminders for employees and managers
Approving changes
Going over the timesheets
Lock the timesheets
Export timesheets for payroll

Step 1: Set your payroll period

Before conducting payroll it is important that you set your payroll period. You can do this by heading to your time clock > clicking on settings at the top right > selecting payroll on the left and selecting the appropriate payroll period

GIF of setting payroll in the Time Clock settings on Connecteam's admin dashboard

Now when you're looking at your timesheets, you and your employees will always be looking at your current payroll period. You can also quickly jump between the payroll periods using the date picker.

Screenshot of payroll period on Connecteam's Time Clock feature on the admin dashboard

Step 2: Set payroll reminders for employees and managers

Have you ever closed payroll to then have an employee let you know that their pay is incorrect? It's a nightmare, we know. To avoid this, you can also remind your managers to go over any edit requests they have sent in! To set up reminders, just head over to the same settings menu as in step 1 as seen in the image below.

Screenshot of setting payroll reminders for employees and managers in Connecteam's Time Clock admin dashboard

Step 3: Approve / Decline requests

Now that your employees have sent in their timesheet requests, and your managers have been reminded to review their requests, it is time to go over them one by one and approve or decline them. This step is important as you do not want to go over their timesheets without making sure that the employees have had a chance to make amendments, or else you might have to unnecessarily repeat the approval process.

GIF of approving a request in Connecteam's Time Clock feature on the admin dashboard

Step 4: Go Over Timesheets

After employees have sent in their requests and you have completed the approval process, it is time to have a final look and look at each employee's timesheet to ensure that everything is correct. To do so, go click on the first user on the list to enter their timecard.

Screenshot of going over timesheets in Connecteam's Time Clock feature on the admin dashboard

Visual Queues

As seen above we have created visual queues to help you quickly spot mistakes in the timesheets. Let's go over them one by one:

Daily Limit - Red numbers indicate that the daily total time is over the daily limit.
Overtime - Yellow numbers indicate that the time is in overtime
Auto Clock Out - The exclamation mark indicates that a user has been auto-clocked out of their schedule
Overnight shift - The chain icon indicates that a shift is spanning across two days
Vacation - Blue text indicates absence hours
Created By - Blue dot indicates who the shift was added by (hover over for more information)
Modified By - The orange dot indicates that the shift was edited by someone (hover over for more information)
Edit Break - Red dot indicates that a break has been edited (hover over for more information)
Incomplete Week - Crossed circle indicates that the date range is shorter than a week

Action Shortcuts

To speed up the process of conducting payroll, we have added many tools at your disposal:

Next employee - In the top right corner you can swiftly jump in between employees to go over their individual timesheets
Chat - By clicking on the chat bubble you can open a chat directly with that employee to ask timesheet-related questions
Add shift - In case a shift was not added you can add it directly from here
Export - You can export an employees timesheet in an excel or PDF format
Add shift - When hovering over a row, we also have a quick action button to add a shift record. Play around with add shift (number 3) and this quick action button to see their different uses.
Remove shift - When hovering over a row you can also quickly remove a shift.

On the right side, you have the ability to add manager notes to add details to a specific shift. Similarly, your employees can also add notes when they clock out or edit a shift.

Editing Shortcuts

GIF of editing timesheets in Connecteam's Time Clock feature on the admin dashboard

Editing your timesheets should also be instantaneous and we've done a lot of the work for you here as well. From the GIF above you can see how we help you do the following (in order):

Edit clock-in/clock-out time
Edit break hours
Add daily hours for when you just need to add a specific amount of hours without necessarily caring about the clock-in and clock-out times
Add weekly hours for when you just need to add a specific amount of hours to the week without necessarily caring about the clock-in and clock-out times

Pro tip

We've also added the Timesheet Conflicts at the top right of your timesheet which will notify you if there are any hourly overlaps, ensuring that you never pay your employees double

GIF of conflict on a timesheet in Connecteam's Time Clock admin dashboard

Step 5: Lock Timesheets

As a business owner, you probably want to make sure that hours in Connecteam and in your payroll software are identical. To ensure that no changes are made by mistake, you can lock your employee's timesheets, ensuring that no edits can be made. When entering a specific user, you can either lock a specific date range or lock each day one by one, depending on your preference.

GIF of locking timesheet in Connecteam's Time Clock admin dashboard

Step 6: Exporting timesheets for payroll

After you have gone over all your employees' hours the final step is to close the window and you are now ready to export the timesheets for payroll. Here we have quite a lot of options for you to choose from. You can either choose to export one of our default exports:

GIF of export options for timesheets in Connecteam's Time Clock admin dashboard

You also have the ability to create your own custom export which will allow you to choose what fields, and in what order you would like to export them, every single time!

GIF of creating custom export in Connecteam's Time Clock admin dashboard

Finally, you also have the ability to integrate with our payroll partners QuickBooks Online and Gusto so that you can directly push work hours to their platform with the click of a button!

GIF of payroll integrations in Connecteam's Time Clock admin dashboard

Additional Tools to help with Payroll:

The expert plan allows you to send periodic auto reports of timesheets and payroll exports to email addresses of your choice and set your payroll process on auto-pilot

Summary

By following the 6 steps mentioned in the article we hope to save you a lot of time and errors so that you can focus on the most essential parts of your business. Our guarantee to you is to continue to improve the payroll process to make sure it is as seamless as possible!

Need more guidance? 🙋 Our LIVE support team (at the bottom right corner of your screen) replies in under 5 mins to ANY question.