From half a day to under an hour: how Mineral Ace Hardware streamlined payroll for their growing business.

Kristina and Lance Stillwaugh own three Ace Hardware stores: two in the Denver metroplex along Colorado’s Front Range and one in a rural community near the Nebraska border. With a team of 35 employees across three locations, Kristina serves as a one-person HR department.

From onboarding and benefits administration to 401(k) management and offboarding, Kristina handles every stage of the employee journey. A core part of her role is managing staff schedules and running bi-weekly payroll. To handle this, the team relied on Deputy for scheduling and time tracking, a system they’ve used since 2021, while manually entering payroll separately through Paycor.

Before utilizing the right integration, Kristina’s payroll process was an exhausting, manual ordeal. “I was on my computer for about half a day trying to get everything entered correctly,” she recalls.

With Deputy and Paycor acting as completely separate, unlinked systems at the time, Kristina was forced to bounce between approval and export screens just to piece together the right information before manually entering it into Paycor. “I was constantly toggling between screens trying to make sure the figures match,” Kristina explains. “It was incredibly time-consuming to prevent overpayments, underpayments, and missed hours.”

Beyond the tedious data entry, this manual process left too much room for human error. If a simple mistake slipped through, such as forgetting to manually switch an employee’s unpaid leave or sick leave, Kristina had to scramble to fix it. While she always ensured her team received supplemental backpay within 24 to 48 hours, the constant need to monitor, verify, and correct data was a heavy administrative burden.

Knowing that her team relied on the accuracy of their paychecks, Kristina realized the manual workaround was no longer sustainable. She needed a seamless way to connect trusted scheduling data directly to her payroll processing without the risk of manual typos or lost hours. When the opportunity arose to try a true integration between the two platforms, she knew it was time to make a change.

When Kristina was offered the chance to try the new Deputy powered by Paycor integration, she jumped at it, knowing exactly what she needed the system to do. “It needs to be easy to get exact hours into payroll so that my employees get paid exactly what they’re owed.”

The impact was immediate. “When I ran the integrated stores, it took me an hour to process payroll,” Kristina says. “We went from half a day to an hour.”

The biggest weight off her shoulders has been knowing that she can trust the data. She explains: “It’s the peace of mind that the numbers coming through are correct and all I have to do is verify,” she notes. “It’s not me constantly fighting the system trying to make sure that things are correct.”

The massive time savings have fundamentally shifted Kristina’s workday. “It’s allowed me to not do my budget at 9 o’clock at night. I’m actually able to do it during normal business hours,” she says. For the employees, Deputy remains the user-friendly, essential platform they rely on to confidently clock in and track their hours. For management, the integration serves as an “easy button,” ensuring her team is paid accurately and on time.

For anyone still manually entering timesheet data, Kristina’s advice is clear: “That is a long and difficult way to work. This is way easier. It’s well worth the effort to get it set up so that I can just press ‘send’ and be done.”