Anybody Want A Paycheck?

Every Tuesday I do the employee payroll. All the waiters, busboys, runners, bartenders, bottle servers, nightclub servers and now lately all the retail employees. I collect all their schedules, check their hours, record and report their tip money and make sure they get paid for all the private parties and events we do. Then I take all the data and record it on an Excel sheet and send it off to our payroll department. The checks come on Friday. Sometimes an employee will wait for me on Friday afternoon to point out a mistake I've made, lying in wait outside the office ready to pounce before I even get my coat off. Of course, they usually only make that mistake once. Sometimes an employee who really should know better will just try to verbally request I pay them more. Like I just send in undocumented requests for checks and they give them to me. I wouldn't be crushed under a mountain of credit card debt if that were the case.

We actually have a software program that should speed up this process but we've never been able to co-ordinate the collective will of myself, the employees, the other managers and the various individual and now outsourced payroll departments to be able to get it up and running. I am determined to remedy this by January 1. But in the meantime payroll takes me about 4 or 5 hours every Tuesday. Today it took me from 11:30 until just after 8:30. Not counting a soup run and some bathroom breaks.

This is in large part due to the increased amount of parties and events in December. The holidays and all. 'Tis the season. Because I work so hard on the payroll, I really try to make sure mistakes are kept to a minimum and everyone gets the money they're due. I basically created the rudimentary stone and tablet method we use to accomplish it every week, and I find I'm quite sensitive to accusations I've made an error or that someone hasn't been paid. It also drives me wild when the payroll department nitpicks for forms and signatures when all I want to do is get someone a check. I realize it's their job. It still makes me crazy.

Many times, an employee will plop down in my office and a bit too arrogantly for my taste announce they were shorted on hours or "something's wrong" with their check. I always dutifully try to address the problem as soon as possible, often spending an hour or two trying to re-construct the week in payroll and find out what's wrong. Sometimes, if I'm not sure, I pay them anyway. But I freely admit to taking a bit of smug satisfaction when I can prove right on the spot in front of witnesses that the "error" was in the person's shoddy or non-existent record keeping, and my borderline OCD use of documentation and filing was, in fact, perfect.