Attendance and payroll: how the data should reach accounting
06.09.2026
In the chain between attendance and payroll the weakest link is not the record itself - it is the handover of the data to accounting. The records may be accurate and the timesheet ready, but if the format is reshaped every month, the gain from automation disappears right there.
This page sets out what has to be agreed to build that handover once.
The weakest link
A typical month end runs like this: HR prepares the timesheet, sends the file to accounting, the accountant reshapes the columns into what their software expects, asks about some rows, waits for answers, then checks again.
None of these steps is complex. The problem is that they repeat every month and every manual touch adds another chance of error.
In practice this means several hours a month - and most of those hours go not into preparing the data but into formatting it.
The format agreement
What turns the handover into mechanical work is a four-point agreement. Writing it once is enough:
- Which columns are needed - employee, personnel number, days worked, hours worked, lateness, overtime, leave, time off.
- The rounding step - to the minute, five minutes or fifteen.
- Whether overtime is shown separately - or included in total hours.
- Which markers leave and time off carry - a separate code per type.
With those four in writing the handover happens the same way every month and stops being a discussion. Without them the same question is asked again every month - and the answer is sometimes different.
The rounding rule
This is the technical detail that causes the most argument, and the choice is between two approaches.
Minute-level accuracy is the most transparent - what the record shows is what is calculated. The downside is that the report looks untidy and comparison gets harder.
A fifteen-minute step is convenient and keeps the report readable. But on one condition: the direction of rounding must be written down in advance. Left unwritten, the same data produces two different results - and that is where disputes start.
A practical tip: add an example when you write the rule. The sentence "a 09:07 check-in is counted as 09:00" closes every later discussion.
Overtime
Overtime is the line most often got wrong in the handover, because it carries two separate questions: how it is calculated and who approves it.
The calculation side is tied to the schedule: time worked beyond it. The approval side is administrative - having overtime flow automatically into pay is usually not the desired outcome.
So the model that works in practice is this: the system records and displays the overtime, while approval stays a separate step. Approved hours go into the report; unapproved ones appear as a separate line.
Why the correction trail matters
A payroll dispute almost always concerns one specific day: "I left at 18:00 on the 21st, the system says 17:30".
If the author, time, reason and original value of a correction are stored, that question is answered in a minute and the discussion ends there.
Without the trail the day is reconstructed from memory: HR remembers one thing, the manager another, the employee a third. In practice the result never satisfies both sides, and the same case repeats the following month.
The pre-handover checklist
A five-point check runs once a month and catches most corrections before payroll is calculated:
- Incomplete days - a check-in with no check-out.
- Unapproved requests - leave and time off.
- Employees whose schedule changed without the timesheet reflecting it.
- The approval status of overtime.
- The list of corrections made during the month.
The last is the most useful: if the number of corrections rises month on month, that signals a gap in the rules - and the source of the problem is the rule, not the record.
A worked example: the hour that repeats every month
At a trading company HR prepared the timesheet and sent it to the accountant. The accountant opened the file, reordered the columns into the sequence their software expected, split out the lateness column and calculated overtime by hand.
That job took roughly an hour every month. An hour does not sound like much - over a year it is twelve, and every manual touch is another chance of error.
The source of the problem was not technical. Nobody had ever asked the accountant what they needed; the format had simply grown that way.
One meeting closed the matter. The accountant named four things: the column order, a fifteen-minute rounding step and its direction, overtime as its own column, and separate codes for leave and time off.
These were written down and the report cut was matched to that layout. The next month the accountant's work fell from an hour to five minutes - open the file, check the totals, load it into the software.
The company noted the lesson: a format agreement is not technical work, it is one meeting. But where that meeting does not happen, the same hour is spent again every month.
Five questions to ask the accountant
One meeting is enough to build the format agreement, and these five questions are asked in it:
- What column order does your software expect?
- What format should hours be in - decimal, or hours:minutes?
- What is the rounding step and in which direction is it applied?
- Is overtime its own column, or included in total hours?
- Which codes do the leave and time-off types carry?
The answers go on one page and are kept by both sides. In later months that document is only reopened if the accounting software changes - and that is a rare event.
A detail worth noting: this meeting should happen before the rollout. Changing the format after the system is built is harder, because the report cuts are already in place and the recipients are used to them.
The next step
The lightest form of handover is a scheduled report: the approved final figures delivered to accounting at a set time. That both fixes the format and removes the risk of forgetting.
See how scheduled reports are set up, look at what QRGate does, or calculate the price.
