But why would someone take a 40+% pay cut by choice? That time must be more valuable than money. There are plenty of reasons besides laziness why this might be true. 

If a California-based employee leaves, check that your provider calculates the accrual on a calendar day basis. If the employee has used some of their balance, this can get tricky. 

One month your paycheck covers 9 workdays. The next month, it covers 12. You get paid the same each time. If you leave in the middle of your next pay period, how is your pay prorated?

He was quite confident that people always know when their paycheck is wrong. I wish that were always true. Payroll is complex, and you don’t know what you don’t know. I see a ton of these kinds of silent errors with 401(k)s. 

There is something that payroll administrators can do to mitigate the Big Check Suckerpunch. It’s not shady and doesn’t expose the departing employee to risk.

Riddle me this: What responsibility is sometimes handled by senior finance and other times by entry-level HR? What function manages a budget of millions but often gets assigned to the person with the lowest hourly rate? 

Choosing payroll software is like tasting wine with the label on the inside: all polish up front and, too often, regret on the back end. By the time you know what’s inside, you’re already seeing double. Picking the best tool is about knowing in advance what “best” means for your working style. The settings you skip during setup are the ones that bite. 

Let's get one thing straight: It's perfectly fine for your company to reimburse people for having a life. But if there's no business purpose or tax-preferred program for it (like an HRA, commuter benefit, or 401k), it has to be taxed as income. 

A PEO is an insurance broker, a guardrail, and a payroll provider. But it’s not a brain. Some people need a PEO. Some need a person. Most don’t know which they are.

I saw a founder on LinkedIn bragging about “solving” six-state compliance. His brilliant solution was... ...wait for it...

Did you know: Payroll doesn’t update tax settings automatically when someone moves. If you live somewhere where it’s common to commute across state lines, having different settings for where someone lives and works seems natural.

As someone who’s familiar with the tools and regulations/processes they manage, it’s painfully obvious that most of these complaints are user error. Not because the user is incompetent. Because people underestimate the difficulty of driving an HRIS. 

Most teams frame it like a software switch. In reality, you’re rebuilding your company’s approach to employee data, payroll, benefits, and compliance from scratch. 

Parental leave combines the most complicated parts of HR into one policy: protected classes, disability, paid time off and sick time, obscure payroll esoterica, employees who are "active" but not "working" (and sometimes don't come back when you expect), insurance (policy details, deductions, and a qualifying event), onboarding and offboarding (maybe more than once per person), a bajillionty federal, state, and local laws, many of which conflict

This wasn’t payroll. It was a cold case. Policies contradicted payroll data. Contracts were locked behind sharing permissions from people who’d left the company. Folder names were gibberish. People paid hourly were getting flat rates with no timecards to confirm overtime. A million Scribe docs with no annotations. Hours of 20-minute videos with no transcripts.

We knew the compliance risks when we picked the non-Safe Harbor 401k option. We thought we were keeping an eye on it.

As an HR department of one, she’d created an environment where people loved to work. I was called in because they were having trouble with a few vendors. And as usual, the problem wasn’t the vendors, but how the company was using the tools.

Termination isn't just a button in your HRIS. It's a tightly regulated event. It's the kind of process where everyone is watching. That’s why HR and managers feel so much pressure to keep it confidential. But too much confidentiality means the people responsible for execution don’t have enough time to get it right. 

These problems don’t show up right away. They lie in wait until someone balances the books and notices thousands of dollars missing. 

Meanwhile, mistrust over the final paycheck was just one in a list of disagreements leading to a quickly deteriorating relationship