Payroll rescue: a Paychex to ADP consolidation.
Healthcare · multi-entity · rescue engagement · built on ADP Workforce Now
Two payroll systems had accumulated the way they usually do: one arrived with an entity, the other was already there, and consolidating them was always next quarter’s job. Each cycle meant running both, exporting both, and reconciling the difference in a spreadsheet that only one person fully understood.
Exceptions were the real cost. A classification difference between entities or a mid-period termination surfaced during submission rather than before it, which turned a processing task into an afternoon of phone calls with a deadline attached.
The platform was already chosen. The operating discipline was not.
- Two payroll systems, reconciled by hand each cycleOne system of record, one reconciliation
- Entity differences handled from memoryEntity rules configured and documented
- Exceptions found during submissionExceptions surfaced before the cycle opens
- One person who knew how it all workedA runbook anyone on the team can follow
This is the study we point at when somebody asks whether we only work on the two platforms we lead with. ADP Workforce Now was decided before we arrived, and the problem was never the software. It was that nobody had designed how payroll ran across entities, so every cycle re-solved the same questions.
We consolidated onto the system already in place, configured the entity rules explicitly rather than leaving them to habit, and moved exception handling to the start of the cycle where it costs an hour instead of a day.
How we run payroll operationsPayroll cycle cut from ~3 days to ~3 hours.
The cycle stopped being an event. What used to occupy most of three days became a morning, and the knowledge of how it worked stopped living in one person’s head — the part that mattered most to a business where that person eventually takes a holiday.
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We treated the consolidation as a systems project first and a documentation project second. It should have been the other way round. The runbook is what made the result hold, and writing it earlier would have surfaced two entity rules nobody had articulated before we hit them mid-cycle.
20 minutes. No deck. No pitch.
You talk. We map what you’re running and where to start. The fixed quote follows the call, in writing.