There is a spreadsheet called Hours_Oct.xlsx in a lot of agencies. Some version of it. Staff send in hours, or the check-in app exports them, and someone copies them into the sheet, checks them against what the client was promised, and then types the totals into Xero for the invoice and into the payroll file for the accountant. Three places, the same numbers, typed by hand. Usually on the last Friday of the month, and late.
The errors are predictable. A night shift straddles midnight and gets counted on the wrong day. Someone worked 7.5 hours and the sheet says 75. A client agreed to 20 hours a week and received 23, and nobody noticed until the client did. Payroll goes out with one person short, and they ring on Monday.
The automated version takes the timesheets from wherever they land. An email with a photo of a paper sheet, or a CSV from the check-in app. It reads each entry into one table: person, client, date, start, end, break. It puts the schedule the client agreed alongside it. Where they match, the hours go straight through. Where they do not match, the row is flagged with the reason: over the agreed hours, no check-in for a scheduled visit, a gap between check-out and check-in that looks like a missed break.
Someone looks at the flagged rows. Usually eight or ten a month out of several hundred. They fix or approve each one. Then two things happen without any typing. A draft invoice per client appears in Xero or QuickBooks with the hours as line items. And the payroll file for the accountant is written in the format they asked for, one row per person, ready to send.
The last Friday of the month becomes an hour of looking at exceptions. This is the kind of thing we build. It runs in your own accounts. What did your last payroll correction cost in time?