Common Mistakes in Payroll Accounting

Is there anything worse than common mistakes when carrying out your payroll? You wonder how it happened and you find yourself having to compare the hours worked against the payroll. Where is the error? Now you have a disgruntled employee waiting for you to correct the mistake. Now you are probably wondering about your payroll software.

Common mistakes when carrying out your payroll can be a simple miscalculation of hours worked. Adding up fractions of hours can be confusing. At times your logged hours for an employee may not be the same amount of hours that the employee thinks they have. Did an hour or a fraction of hours worked not get recorded on your payroll software?

Overtime can throw a wrench into payroll accounting. Depending on the company policy an employee normally gets time and half for any hours worked past forty hours a week. Again you find yourself working with fractions of time worked. Many times in payroll accounting instead of logging overtime pay regular pay is logged instead. You may not catch the error but if it slips past your payroll software you can guarantee that the employee who is expecting the extra income will catch the mistake and be at your office for an explanation of the wage shortage.

Company paid time can cause glitches in your payroll accounting. Maybe your company had mandatory meetings that were company paid and they were not logged into your accounting system. Reimbursements can also cause problems when they are not recorded. Reimbursements can include anything from tolls, scales, uniforms, postage or basically anything that your company will pay for an employee if they paid for it out of pocket.

A simple transposing of numbers can cause a horrible mistake in your payroll accounting. Imagine mixing two numbers like twenty-four and eighty-four. You don't catch the error and you tabulate your payroll. You now find yourself with either an over payment or you have shorted someone on their paycheck. If you have over paid an employee they will not be happy when they either have to give the overage back or it is deducted from a future paycheck. If you have shortened an employee on their paycheck again they will be at your door wanting it corrected immediately. Either way it is a nasty situation to find yourself in. Payroll accounting is very precise and is not forgiving in regards to errors.

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