How to Reduce Payroll Errors in the Nursing Sector

Conventional nurse scheduling methods usually rely on manual, paper-based processes that are static, prone to errors, and don’t easily accommodate last-minute changes. Since these conventional schedules also act as the foundations of hospital time and attendance systems for payroll, they often carry their intrinsic limitations from one system to another.

Fortunately, healthcare facilities are now able to minimize payroll errors and streamline scheduling processes by digitizing their employees’ scheduling experiences. Let’s discover some of the tangible benefits on payroll systems when optimizing underlying hospital employee scheduling processes with technology.

Digital Time and Attendance Management

Thanks to technological advancements, medical facilities are now able to take advantage of new digital systems that can streamline nurse scheduling processes, monitor working hours effectively, and accurately translate time worked into correct pay for employees. These systems are able to track employee hours and have built-in processing functions designed to facilitate and optimize attendance management and prevent possible errors in payroll. Furthermore, by using a time and attendance solution from the same vendor as the scheduling solution, the fully integrated solutions easily support a streamlined workflow. They also offer integrated reporting capabilities to help managers easily access accurate data on nurses' worked hours, overtime hours, planned absences like leaves and vacation, and unplanned absences like sick time.

Improved Analytics and Timesheet Reporting

In addition to creating and monitoring nurses’ working hours and translating them into accurate payroll timesheets, a digital time and attendance system is also designed to collect, organize, and report on time-related information, such as trends involving overtime and absences. Hospital management can then use this information to:

• Identify issues involving recurrent time exceptions, such as tardiness
• Identify budgeted hours vs actual hours
• Understand trends around overtime and absenteeism
• Formulate solutions to increase productivity
• Adjust staff Planning to meet changes in demand

Streamlining time and attendance management reduces the occurrence of payroll errors by eliminating data entry into multiple systems and ensuring automatic timesheet updates flow directly to payroll.  With digital time and attendance systems, identifying issues and outliers can be done easily since the platform is built to notify managers of time exceptions based on digital scheduling and biometric time captures.  This automated process allows managers to review variances between the posted schedule and actual time ensuring payroll is always accurate.

Ensuring Compliance

A medical facility must always comply with employment legislation as well as health and safety requirements in effect. These policies and rules are in place to prevent errors and accidents from happening in the workplace, including payroll errors. Fortunately, with a digital scheduling tool , hospital management can confidently assign staff according to contracted hours, skills, or safety requirements and eliminate any underlying risks of non-compliance. By transforming and modernizing its scheduling processes, a medical facility or hospital will not only optimize workload distribution and staff management, it will also effectively minimize payroll errors.