How Do You Know a Pay Period Is Ready to Run?

Why readiness is a list, not a feeling

'Looks fine' is how ghost hours survive into a run: one employee's unapproved overtime here, one stale rate there, each individually plausible. A readiness checklist converts the feeling into four countable states, each of which is either done or not.

Order matters because effort is finite on cutoff day. Clearing scope and duplicates first means every later number is trustworthy; clearing approvals before mismatches means specialists spend their remaining hours on judgment calls, not chase emails.

What to bring

Bring the current approved time and rate records, the latest draft register, and the import history for the period so already-processed imports can be recognized.

Bring the acceptance rules too: which residual mismatches the specialist may consciously accept, and who signs that acceptance. Readiness includes deciding what stays unresolved.

Step 1: Verify project scope on everything

Confirm every record belongs to the project being run. Cross-project data is rejected with nothing read — treat that rejection as the checklist working, not a nuisance to route around.

Step 2: Deduplicate the imports

Imports already processed return as duplicate-import with zero new exceptions. Confirm the period's numbers reflect exactly one copy of reality before comparing anything.

Step 3: Chase the missing approvals

List every approval-missing employee and work the approvers. This gates step four: a mismatch conversation without the approval settled may need redoing once it lands.

Step 4: Resolve or accept the mismatches

Hours and rate findings arrive with both values beside them. Correct the register where the draft is wrong; document acceptance where the difference is intentional and authorized. Payrune never modifies payroll — corrections stay in the specialist's hands.

Step 5: Declare readiness with the remainder named

Whatever is unresolved at run time gets named, owner attached, and carried consciously. Payrune never calculates pay or tax, modifies payroll, or releases payments — the declaration of ready is a human signature on a known state, not a green tick nobody audited.

Verification

The ready declaration cites artifacts: the final exception register, the duplicate confirmations, and the acceptance notes for anything carried. Spot-check one cleared employee end to end — both source values present, no unnamed gap — before trusting the rest.

Limits that stay in this checklist

Missing source fields become named failures; hours and rates are never invented. Deadline pressure reorders the work; it never lowers the standard of evidence.

Payrune never calculates pay or tax, modifies payroll, or releases payments. The checklist ends at a documented human decision, wherever your organization draws that authority.

What Payrune does in this checklist

Payrune automates the counting, not the deciding: scope enforcement, duplicate detection, typed findings in stable order, both values preserved per exception, and recovery that merges prior findings when the period spans several sessions.

Specialists arrive at cutoff with a list sorted by what kind of attention each item needs — instead of a register and a prayer.