Implementing Time and Attendance Systems: The City of Scottsdale, Arizona Experience.

This article highlights how the City of Scottsdale, Arizona, transformed its error-ridden manual timekeeping process into a state-of-the-art, Web-based system.

The City of Scottsdale, Arizona's pay roll processing department deals with approximately 2,300 employees biweekly. Seventy-five percent of those employees are non-exempt and subject to overtime and special pays. Special payroll complications deal with unique compensation and labor laws related to public safety personnel (police and fire) and a large number of seasonal, part-time, and rotational parks and recreation employees.

Scottsdale was using manual timesheets to collect and authorize employee hours for biweekly payroll processing. Error rates from manual input were more than 20 percent, forcing payroll staff to expend a great deal of time and effort correcting errors. Because payroll staff corrected the errors, employees had no incentive to improve their own input accuracy.

Efforts by payroll staff using employee training, statistical feedback, and encouragement made only a slight improvement in the input quality. Manual timesheet efforts were simply seen as a tedious chore among employees and supervisors alike.

Turnaround time is critical to the payroll process. Accuracy, legibility, special pay, and leave mistakes combined with the volume of manual timesheet input presented a regular snag in orderly processing of payroll. The persistent 20 percent input error rate was categorized by the root causes:

* incomplete or no totals;

* illegible entries;