Payroll Sign-off in Kronos Timekeeper (and ADP eTime)

Once a pay period has closed, the payroll process begins. As most in Payroll already know, the payroll process incorporates preparing the time collected in Kronos Workforce Timekeeper, reviewing and validating that data, then sending it over to the payroll system. Your payroll system then processes the data and does many things, the most important of which is to provide those paychecks to employees.

The payroll process is an excellent topic that we've previously covered on the Kronos Guy Blog. The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of the Sign-off feature in Workforce Timekeeper. 

What is a sign-off and what does it really do?

The Sign-off function is a lock that functionally closes pay period data to further edits. You probably know how this works. Managers, supervisors and in some instances, employees review their own time and/or the time of the employees they manage. Managers and supervisors edit their employees' time to ensure accuracy. This generally means correcting missed punches, unexcused absences and applying comments and notes for exception punches. Once this is done, the employee (hence the backward nature of the employee approval) then the supervisor or manager (and in some cases, both) approve the timecard. That approval tells the payroll analyst, and everyone who can view that timecard, that it is good to go, or in other words, ready for processing. Of course, there is more to it, but that's for another discussion.

Once the required people have approved the timecards, the payroll analyst is up to bat. Hopefully, the timecard data is ready for processing, but something might have been missed, so the payroll analyst always should review that data with the use of an appropriate Workforce genie to ensure there are no issues that would affect the employee’s pay. The three most common issues are:

1. Missed punches
2. Unexcused absences
3. Zero pay code hours

Though earning zero hours in a pay code is not a common issue, and in some organizations, one not worth tracking, unexcused absences and missed punches are. That is why Kronos created certain conditions as required to Sign-off. Depending on your configuration, Timekeeper will not allow a Sign-off if any of the conditions above exist. It’s the last line of defense to help ensure you will send the correct data to your payroll system for processing. Once all of these conditions have been discovered and if necessary, corrected, it's time to move on to the Sign-off. The physical processing of a Sign-off is identical to an approval;

1. Click Approvals in the Action menu
2. Click Sign-off

Done and done. It’s that simple and once completed, you have effectively locked the previous pay period from edits by anyone. Now don’t worry, if you have access to the Sign-off function, it’s a good bet you have access to Remove Sign-off functionality (or at least perhaps you sit close to someone who does!)

A commonly held misconception is that once applied, Sign-off locks and closes only the previous pay period. This isn’t the case. Signing-off locks ALL NON SIGNED OFF TIME DATA. In the good old Kronos days (read as the early to mid-90’s) often organizations would ignore the Sign-off altogether. This did two things; one kinda nice and one kinda terrible. Nice was that older time records were available for editing. Terrible was the performance hit because the Application Server has to walk through ALL unsigned off data during the Totalization process. Systems could come to a crawl. Now, do you see why you really should make Sign-off a part of your normal payroll process? Once an amount of time data (read as the previous pay period, last March, or 1998) is signed off, Kronos Timekeeper (and ADP eTime) no longer has to re-totalize all that, making the application work more efficiently and quickly for everyone. 

The Sign-off is more than just a lock, it’s a means of archiving older time data (not to be confused with using the actual Archive tool) that allows for users to view older time records without sacrificing system resources. It’s a tool that needs to be a regular part of your payroll process.