How We Saved 240 Hours on Payroll Processing This Year

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Finance and accounting teams have always been stewards of accuracy and control. But today, we’re expected to do more. From strategic insights to operational efficiency, we’re being asked to lead from the front, not just balance the books.

Payroll is just one of the areas my team oversees. For us, it’s not only about paying people on time, it’s about building trust across HR, finance, and every employee.

Building that trust requires dedication and hard work. It can be exhausting — especially when you’re handling things manually, like we used to. Every change, no matter how small, meant hours of effort. And a lot of anxiety.

Today, we’re no longer fixing errors. We’re preventing them.

The stakes are high when you work in payroll, which is why my team was so eager to be heavily involved in ensuring that Lattice Payroll would work well for us and our customers.

Our work has paid off: Because Lattice connects the employee lifecycle — from onboarding to first paycheck, from performance review to promotion — all in one system, we’ve eliminated hours of rework and closed the gap between intent and execution.

Now, when we onboard a new hire, proration just happens. When we run payroll, there’s no need for manual reconciliation. When we approve a raise, it gets paid correctly — no extra steps. Today, we're no longer fixing errors. We’re preventing them.

Our Process Before Lattice Payroll

Before we started using our own payroll system, we relied on a legacy payroll provider. Our biggest issue was how much extra work it created for our small team of three to manage payroll for nearly 500 employees. Every employee data change, no matter how small, meant hours of extra work. Generally, that meant following a process like this:

1. Pull reports from Lattice HRIS.
2. Upload those into the provider — or key them in manually.
3. Reconcile manually.
4. Hope nothing broke.

All of those little things on the payroll side, from deductions to hours, have to be perfect every time. And even then, you’re crossing your fingers.

3 Ways Lattice Saves Time on Payroll

For most teams, payroll friction happens in a few key places. For Lattice, onboarding, regular pay runs, and our yearly compensation cycle were often major sticking points. But because these are such day-to-day paper cuts, many payroll teams simply grin and bear it (and credit to them, for getting us all paid on time!). 

Since switching to Lattice Payroll, our manual double-work has disappeared. Because everything, including HRIS, compensation, and payroll, is built into a single platform, the team saves 8–12 hours every pay period just on data updates and reconciliation. That’s over 200 hours a year. Here’s how:

1. Onboarding flows into payroll automatically.

We used to enter a new hire into Lattice HRIS, then again in our legacy provider, and manually prorate their first check — and send a wire if they onboarded too close to payday. It was clunky and error-prone.

Now, we add new hires in Lattice and that’s it. Payroll proration, deductions, taxes, and first checks are calculated without us lifting a finger. So if a new hire joins two days before payday — no problem.

When I approve compensation in Lattice, it will sync straight to payroll. No re-entry, no spreadsheets.

2. Running payroll requires fewer manual reviews.

Every payroll administrator knows the stress that comes with running payroll, whether it’s  tracking period-over-period changes, ensuring deductions are accurate, or catching any hiccups. Running payroll required multiple manual data reviews and reconciliations.

Now that our data is centralized, I’m no longer triple-checking if payroll has the right info. It’s already aligned and accurate, and I have more confidence in what I’m about to approve.

3. Compensation changes only happen once.

Lattice runs an annual compensation cycle, which has historically been a real time sink. Previously, HR would approve compensation in Lattice then send us a spreadsheet. We'd re-enter it all into our legacy provider, then double-check every field for any mistakes.

This year, when I approve compensation in Lattice, it will sync straight to payroll. No re-entry, no spreadsheets, and no risk of dropping something between systems.

What Lattice Payroll Looks Like Today

You’re only as good as your data, so your source of truth has to be your HRIS. But when your HRIS and payroll live in separate systems, every change becomes a risk. If the HRIS isn’t accurate, payroll will go haywire. And there are endless ways for that to happen.

As a result, you spend countless hours on the manual work of entering, checking, and re-entering data in order to prevent payroll errors — because they can have catastrophic, real effects on people’s lives.

With that in mind, here’s a shortlist of how consolidating HR and payroll has saved our team both time and stress. If you’re dealing with payroll papercuts, you can use our example as a template and map out all of your own change processes to estimate how much time you’re losing to payroll friction.

We’ve saved at least 8-12 hours per pay period just by removing these common sources of friction. That means my team can run payroll faster, spend less time on reconciliation, and focus on strategic work instead.

There are intangible benefits on top of material hours saved. Because we have more trust in the system we’re using to run payroll, we’re saving brainspace as well. My team has to do less work to produce a final payroll run for me to approve, and it’s less of a weight on me as well.

I don’t have to think about whether payroll got the latest comp data or whether a new hire is set up correctly. It just works.

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