Payroll shouldn't be the thing that ruins your week. But for a lot of shift-based business owners, that's exactly what it is—a multi-day grind of manual calculations and a knot in your stomach before you hit submit. That anxiety isn't unfounded.
One in five US payrolls contains errors, costing an average of $291 per mistake. For shift-based businesses, managing complex pay codes and multi-site staff makes the margin for error—and the potential cost—even higher.
We recently hosted a live webinar with two business owners using Deputy Payroll enabled by Paycor. What they shared is worth your time because it’s an honest look at how demanding payroll can get, and how fast things change when the process actually works.
When complexity compounds
Marianne Lipari is the Bookkeeping Managerat Exit 11 Coffee, a drive-thru coffee business with nine locations and around 95 field employees. Her staff regularly works across three or four different locations in a single pay period. That means, for every pay run, she manually split hours by location, calculated weekly overtime for each employee, and reconciled it across nine separate bank accounts.
"It took me 20 hours and my assistant 20 hours—a total of 40 hours to do payroll. When Monday came around, payroll week, we wanted to cry. It was just a crazy process."
Kristina Stillwaugh owns three Ace Hardware stores with around 35 employees. With three separate store setups to manage in Paycor, she had to run three separate imports every pay run; and the import consistently failed, leaving her with no choice but to manually enter everything from scratch.
"It was arduous. It was a long, hard process to get my payroll before this integration."
These aren't unusual situations. They're the natural result of running a multi-location shift business where payroll complexity grows alongside the business itself.
One connection changes everything
Deputy Payroll enabled by Paycor creates a direct link between approved timesheets in Deputy and the Paycor pay grid. Approved time flows directly into payroll—no exports, no spreadsheets, no manual entry.
For multi-location businesses, the critical feature is the ability to send each employee's hours to the specific location where the work was actually done, rather than defaulting to a home department. For Marianne from Exit 11 Coffee, that single configuration option eliminated her entire manual reconciliation process.
"I don't have to export to an Excel spreadsheet anymore. It just automatically imports the correct hours at the correct location. It's right every time."
For Kristina from Mineral Creek Ace, the integration's accuracy surprised her most, particularly given how difficult the process had been before.
"The thing that really surprised me in this whole process was how efficiently Deputy was able to make that integration with Paycor, because going the other direction had been such a challenge."
Every pay type flows through correctly—regular hours, overtime, paid time off, personal days, and vacation. As Kristina put it: "All I have to do is check and make sure that everything came across and it's been correct."
Kristina's most recent payroll run across all three stores took her less than an hour. Marianne's total processing time dropped from 40 hours to an hour. For both of them, the change wasn't incremental. It was immediate.
What you do with the time is the real story
The hours saved matter. But what operators do with those hours matters more.
Kristina finished her budget paperwork during business hours and started working on employee recognitions—things that had previously spilled into her evenings.
"I finished all my budget paperwork during my workday instead of after hours yesterday, and I have started working on all of my employee recognitions."
For Marianne, the reclaimed time opened up a different kind of opportunity—investing in the people running her locations day to day.
"It's just opened up so much of an opportunity to feed our middle management a little bit more, train them a little bit more, so that they can be better and do better out at the locations. It kind of trickles down from this one part."
Payroll efficiency doesn't just save time. It creates the space to do everything else better. When that pressure is lifted, the impact goes well beyond the pay run itself.
See it for yourself
Watch the full 45-minute session including a live product walkthrough and the full customer conversation with Marianne and Kristina.
Want to go deeper? Read how Marianne at Exit 11 Coffee, Kristina at Mineral Creek Ace, and Darin at Eastham Ace Hardware made the switch to Deputy Payroll enabled by Paycor, and what their workflows look like now.
Ready to stop fighting your payroll process? Visitdeputy.com/payroll-software to register your interest and start the conversation
