Payroll took twenty-five hours a week. Now it takes about one.
Pay runs biweekly across twenty-four payroll entities, but on staggered calendars, so some come due one week and the rest the next. Payroll never stops. Every cycle the Toast exports were assembled by hand in Excel: tips reconciled, columns rebuilt, files retyped into ADP, then reports emailed out location by location. Three full days of somebody's week, on a deadline, where a typo is somebody's paycheck.
The rules were never the same twice. Sixteen locations carry credit-card gratuity into its own earnings column; the seven Surf Bagel stores run cash tips only and no gratuity columns at all; one exports a bare CSV with neither.1 Employee names arrived formatted three different ways depending on who typed them in.
Now it's a web app. Upload the Toast export and the tip sheet, get back ADP-ready import files and a searchable report each director can filter to their own locations. Before it writes a single file it checks tipped employees against minimum wage and hands back a validation report — so a tip-credit shortfall surfaces on payroll day, not three weeks later.2
1Which column a tip belongs in is not cosmetic. Put gratuity where a location doesn't carry it and you have filed a payroll correction, not a rounding error. The app knows which rule set each entity uses and won't offer you the wrong upload.
2Tipped wages plus tips have to clear minimum wage, and when they don't the employer owes the difference. That arithmetic used to live in somebody's head across twenty-four entities. Now it's a report that runs before the file does.
