AUTOMATED PAYROLL DATA RECONCILIATION

PROJECT BACKGROUND

• The Company is on a payroll timekeeping system called Atlas.

• At the end of each bi-weekly payroll cycle, the time data is imported from Atlas into Great Plains for final processing, calculation and paycheck generation.

• However, in order to be paid on Friday, the file must be transmitted to the bank within 2 days. To successfully make that deadline, the reconciliation between the two systems must be complete by the morning of the second day.

• As the Company grew quickly, the reconciliation process became more time consuming. Frequently, a new employee might be in one system, and not another. Or, overtime hours might not be calculated correctly. As a result, the average time to complete the reconciliation gradually rose to about ½ day per pay period.

WHAT COULD THE DIFFERENCES BE?

• Absent data anomalies, the individual employee differences between systems could fall into one of four categories:

I. An employee’s data is the same in both systems – great!

II. An employee’s record is in the time-keeping system, but not in the payroll system – research & correct

III. An employee’s record is in the payroll system, but not in the time-keeping system – research & correct

IV. An employee’s record is in both systems, but the hours are different – research & correct

I or IV

II III

AUTOMATING THE RECONCILIATION PROCESS – MY SOLUTION• Using Excel 2013 and Visual Basic, I created an application for the Company that will

reconcile two data sets, and provide a reconciliation report on the differences.

• In total, the process takes 5 to 10 seconds to reconcile 4,000 payroll records.

• The employee that used to perform the reconciliation manually can now do something else that morning.

• For more details go to www.randyhohn.com/portfolio

Note: To protect confidentiality, portions of this process have been changed from the original project. However, the methodology used to solve the issues has been preserved. The names used in this demonstration are completely fictitious, and not intended to represent real people.

• This image shows the data from the timekeeping system on Sheet 1.

• The comparative data from the payroll system is on Sheet 2, in the same layout.

• The only instructions are:

1. For both tabs, make sure the ids are in Column C.

2. Put the hours in Column F, D & E are optional.

3. Push the button.

4. Check out the report.

• This image shows the Report tab, which is updated each time the reconciliation is run.

• The summary reconciliation from Sheet 1 to Sheet 2 is at the top.

• The detailed list of differences begins at row 12 and ties to the summary.

• The reconciliation status is reported in Column C.

• When duplicate entries are identified, the application applies shading to the ID in Column A.

• The application took just over 6 seconds to run.