How Do You Check a Draft Payroll Register Before Running It?

What pre-payroll review actually protects

Every payroll run is a promise that the numbers leaving the account match the hours people worked and the rates they were offered. The draft register is where transcription errors, stale rates, and forgotten approvals concentrate — before the run they are cheap edits; after it they are corrections, back-pay, and trust damage.

The review has one discipline at its core: never let two disagreeing numbers collapse into one. An employee drafted at 42 hours against 40 approved is not 'about right'; it is a specific question with two recorded values waiting for a specific person.

What to bring

Bring the approved time and rate records for the pay period and the draft payroll register you intend to check. Both must belong to the same project scope — records from another project or client are rejected outright, which is itself a protection.

Bring approval references if your process keeps them. They let a missing approval be named precisely instead of guessed around.

Step 1: Confirm the scope of both sources

The review only compares records from the authenticated project. Cross-project data is rejected with nothing read rather than partially compared, so a stray file from another client cannot contaminate the register.

Step 2: Walk employees in order

Each employee is checked in the order supplied, with three questions asked in sequence: do the hours match, does the rate match, does an approval exist? Fixed order means identical inputs produce identical lists — and a skipped employee is visible, not silent.

Step 3: Read both values, never one

Every exception carries the approved value and the draft value side by side. A rate shown as 24.50 against 25.00 tells the specialist where to look; a bare 'rate mismatch' would just send them back to the same two spreadsheets.

Step 4: Treat missing approvals as their own finding

A missing timesheet approval is reported as approval-missing — a distinct class from any value mismatch. It is never resolved by assuming the drafted numbers were agreed; silence is not consent in payroll.

Step 5: Hand the list to the specialist

The output requires human approval by design. Payrune never calculates pay or tax, modifies payroll, or releases payments — correcting the register stays with the specialist who owns it, now working from a complete list instead of spot checks.

Verification

A second reviewer can take the exception register and trace any line to both source values: the approved figure, the drafted figure, and which of the three classes flagged it. Employees absent from the list should genuinely have no gaps — sampling one or two confirms the review covered everyone supplied.

Limits that stay in this job

Missing source fields become named failures; hours and rates are never invented. If the approved record lacks a rate, the answer is a named failure on that employee, not a carried-over assumption.

Payrune never calculates pay or tax, modifies payroll, or releases payments. Gross-to-net math, register edits, and payment runs live outside the review entirely.

What Payrune does in this workflow

Payrune is a conversation-led pre-payroll workspace. You supply the period's approved time and rate records plus the draft register; it produces the exception register with both values preserved, typed findings in stable order, and human approval required on every result.

You still run payroll afterward. The product's whole value is that nobody runs it surprised.