I run payroll for a small southern city. Payroll is processed on Wednesday and direct deposited Thursday. It is due to employee by 2:00 on Friday. We give employees their pay checks on Thursday as a small courtesy.
So why are people that have been here for 10+ years, who have never missed a check, called me at 8:50 Thursday morning to let me know they haven’t gotten their direct deposit? Your bank isn’t even open yet, ya fucking idiot.
1 Call: Lalalala
2 Calls: Huh…did I mess up the date? Check - Nope!
3 Calls: It’s going to be one of those days…
7 Calls: I need to further my progress of becoming a professor!
I do payroll at my small business. We don’t offer direct deposit, you just come in and grab your check. Checks come out on Wednesday. That’s all the information you get. So, I’ll often have people come in on Wednesday, ask for their check, I’ll tell them it’s not ready (payroll is one of about 27,000 things I do) and they’ll say “Checks are supposed to be ready on Wednesday” and I’ll reply “Yeah, and it’s going to be Wednesday for another 5 hours yet, don’t worry, they’ll be ready before we close”. Some people will continue on with “But, I need the money now”…“Sorry, that’s not really my problem”.
As I’ve been saying for years, if you can make some small adjustments in your life and pretend like your paycheck comes out on Thursday then it’ll be ready any time you want to pick it up instead of waiting for me to be done.
That’s something you [the OP] could tell the employees. Adjust your budgeting/mindset to pretend like the direct deposit will show up on Friday, then it’ll be in their account whenever they want to spend it.
When I used to run a direct deposit payroll, once in a blue moon I didn’t always have time to run around and hand out the stubs the day before. I had one employee who would send a complaint to my boss every time she didn’t receive her stub the day before payday. This was a salaried employee who’s pay only changed twice a year…when the annual increases came out and when the taxable benefit for health insurance changed. She seemed to think management was out to get her and that not receiving her stub was violating her rights. It was always the same bloody amount FFS. It was no mystery what amount was being deposited into her account. It was never late and it was never wrong.
I got so fed up with her tattling about something so trivial I finally phoned the labour board and discovered she wasn’t entitled to her stub until payday itself. hmpf! Petty people eventually force the rest of us to be equally petty in turn.
My paydays are Wednesdays. My direct deposit always hits between 12am and 1am Wednesday morning, often verified online since I work nights and am up then. I would never imagine the deposits would go in any earlier than that. Every once in a great while the deposit doesn’t hit until 6am, but that’s been maybe 4 times in the last 10 years.
As I mentioned, I have ton of stuff to do, sometimes I just don’t have time to get to it. Last Tuesday I was up on a roof fixing a compressor. Payroll is going to come out Wednesday afternoon instead of Wednesday morning so that thousands of dollars worth of seafood didn’t start melting. But it still came out on Wednesday.
Also, all my work (WRT payroll) gets double checked by someone else, so he still has to be around to check my work before those checks come out.
So, no, with how broad my job description is, with how many things I do at that store, everything from driving, to repair work, to running registers, AP/AR, unloading trucks, book work, deliveries, mopping floors, HR type work, you name it I do it, there’s not any magic adjustment I can make somewhere in my schedule that would allow me to get payroll done 24 hours earlier on a regular basis. I just do it at some point when I have time. Sometimes it’s Monday morning when I walk in, sometimes it’s Wednesday at noon.
Will that make them get done sooner?
You know that direct deposit costs the employer money, right?
Always too funny when people bitch and whine about not receiving their stub when they have direct deposit. Only my current job, my pay is in my account on Friday. I get my stub in the mail the following Tuesday. I don’t fucking care as long as the money is in the bank on Friday when it is supposed to be. The stub will be along eventually, and although I work hourly and my paycheck can vary, I generally have a pretty solid idea of how much I’m getting.
Really? Most places I have worked my employers insisted that we get direct deposit. I was told by HR this was done because it cost the company less for direct deposit.
Above enough employees, yes, too few and it’s more expensive or break even. It’ll also be cheaper if they use direct deposit/bill pay for other things. We’d have to have the “direct deposit module*” which is something like $15 per month and then there’s a per deposit fee. OTOH, with checks we get charged, IIRC, 25¢ for each check we write. We have, right now, about 15 employees. That means right now, direct deposit would cost us 25¢ + whatever the fee per “check” is. That’s more then a paper check.
Also, being a small business, we do rely on the float during some weeks. Having employees take a day or two to cash their checks or having checks take a day or two to reach their destination in the mail is a help during the slow times.
If it’s a bigger company, direct deposit may very well be cheaper, especially if that means not having to mail checks (which adds 41¢ to each check, plus the envelope), it may make book keeping easier since there’s going to be fewer mistakes and no lost pay checks. It’s going to be less hassle for the payroll department in a company with hundreds of employees. But for our 10-15 employees, this has been working pretty well for a while and we’re probably going to stick with it for the foreseeable future.
*Direct Deposit Module sounds like a physical thing, but it’s just a banking product that they would set up our account with, like billpay.
Actually, each physical check costs about a dime, so call it even.
Yup. Let any earlier arrivals be happy surprises. Maybe warn repeat offenders with “The time I spend telling you the checks aren’t ready yet is more time that I can’t spend on working towards getting those checks done.”
Deposit. If he uses direct debit, he’ll be charging the employees - I doubt they’d appreciate it.
Joey P, direct deposit by electronic transaction (that is, in a bank that has moved into the currrent century) is a matter of downloading a text file to your computer’s desktop and uploading it to the bank’s webpage. Ta-da, you’re done, the money will be available the following day. So yeah, if your bank is properly set up (which I think may be a big if), direct deposit is a lot faster.
If the offenders are that much of a nuisance, it seems to me tht the checks should ONLY be available at the end of the day regardless of when they in fact have been prepared. Repeat “It’s not four o’clock yet. Go away” enough times and people will (hopefully) stop asking, particularly if it is possible to prevent people from seeing when the checks have actually been prepared.
