Payroll Fiasco

At my internship, my supervisor oversees payroll for most of the food and beverage outlets. So, in order to help her lessen her load of work, I handle payroll from now on. This requires us to use two different softwares to collect information that we put into an excel formula spreadsheet and from there, the formulas calculate employers tips from each day which we compile into a weekly overview/summary and at the end of the two week pay period, we file it and submit it to the payroll master who handles all types of payroll for all our hotel locations. The first software we use is on ultipro which by adding different codes, (every outlet has a code and every type of employee has a code) we are able to get a list of each outlets schedule for each day. The schedules have everyone’s name written on an excel spreadsheet with their employee code, (for example: are they a bartender? server? food runner? etc) their regular hours and overtime hours if any. We then copy this information and add it to the payroll sheet on excel. Every code is already programmed to allocate a certain amount of tip money to each employee based on their hours worked. For example, a server makes a higher percentage of tip than a busser/food-runner, and the formulas plugged into the excel sheet are able to calculate that. Next we go onto Avero which after plugging in some more codes, allows us to get a list of all the tips made that day for each restaurant.

For me, this process was very easy to learn. My supervisor said it usually takes other interns a long time to understand it and work it on their own and that she was happy she was able to pass this responsibility on to me so quickly. That being said, I felt proud and responsible and like I was helping out with a large task which needs to be completed on a daily basis. While it is an easy task to complete for me, doing it wrong can result in people’s pay checks being wrong, missing money or making too much money which then has to be deducted from their next pay which is always as hassle. One of the bussers at the rooftop was coded wrong by human resources and therefore his pay was all wrong for his tip outs. This was causing a lot of problems for him as he had to pay his bills and was missing his hard earned money. He sent some aggressive texts to the assistant director of food and beverage regarding his missing money. My co-worker understood he had every right to be mad and annoyed by this and so he wanted to fix the problem as soon as possible.

On Monday, my supervisor called out sick and I was alone for the day. The payroll master and the assistant director of food and beverage came to my desk frantic that we needed to fix this employee’s pay and figure out how much the hotel owed him. While I was comfortable in doing present tip outs/payroll, I had never done a retro-pay which would mean deducting other employee’s previous pay. I knew I needed to help because it was unfair what this employee was going through. I did not want to bother my supervisor while she was sick so I told them it was under control and that I would get back to them with the owed amount. I spent that whole day at work writing out numerous math equations, typing in multiple codes and creating new formulas on excel until I figured out how to get all his missed pay back and calculate how much money would be retrieved from the other employee’s paychecks. When I brought my findings back to the payroll master, he was delighted to see that I had finished it all in one day and thanked me so much in a followup email that was sent out to the director of human resources, finance and food and beverage. I felt accomplished for being recognized for work that actually had a purpose- repaying someone we owed over $1000 to.

Through this experience, I learned that teamwork really does make the dream works, no matter how corny/cliche that phrase is. This is because even though it was human resources fault that this employee wasn’t getting tipped correctly, it still became my responsibility to fix it. Anyone else could have blamed human resources, complained about them and so on, but I understood that people make mistakes and I was willing to manually re-code this employee and help fix his pay situation because I felt badly for him and knew it was the right thing to do. It also showed the higher up people in my office that I was helpful and a team player who was willing to solve problems. For me, getting recognition in the hotel was worth the day-long migraine of mathematic equations that I haven’t visited since high school.