The same First Nation government ran payroll on paper: punch cards hand-computed every two weeks, timesheets hand-carried for signature, leave and overtime on paper forms. We built the system that reads the cards, computes the timesheets, and puts approval one email click away — with leave, overtime, and mileage handled by text message.
Staff clock in and out on a punch-card machine that prints paper strips. Every two weeks, one person gathered the cards and hand-computed each employee’s hours — in at 7:55, out at 4:15, round up, round down, subtract the break — for every employee, every pay period.
Everything around the cards was manual too. Timesheets were hand-carried to a desk for signature. Leave was a paper form; overtime approval meant printing a form, filling it by hand, and walking it to an office. When someone didn’t show up, nobody knew why. And once hours reached payroll, corrections happened silently — no note, no record, no way to say which number was right.
The cards come in by email, the timesheets compute themselves, and everything around them — leave, overtime, mileage — runs through the same approval flow.
Staff photograph or scan the punch cards and email them to one address. The system reads every punch off the card image and files it against the right employee — an unreadable card is flagged for a person, never guessed.
Ins, outs, rounding rules, and breaks are applied automatically, and each employee’s timesheet for the pay period fills itself in. Every computed line links back to the card image it came from.
The approver’s email lands with the period’s timesheets; one click approves. After approval the record locks — corrections are manager-owned with a mandatory note, and payroll receives the approved hours read-only.
Vacation, sick, and unpaid leave are requested by plain text message or a web form. Approved paid leave fills the timesheet at standard hours and draws down the balance — and a no-show is visible the same day.
An overtime request goes out and gets approved the same one-click way — before the hours are worked, not argued about after. The approved OT is already on the timesheet when the period closes.
A mileage claim is a text or a short form — from, to, and why. Distances are double-checked against map data, claims roll into the same approval flow, and the biweekly payout list writes itself.
The hand-computation is gone. Payroll starts from timesheets the system has already computed and reconciled — not from arithmetic done under a deadline.
The post-approval lock and manager-owned corrections mean payroll can finally trust the numbers — every adjustment has an owner and a reason attached.
Leave is requested, approved, and reflected in the timesheet automatically — and a no-show raises a flag the same day.
Each computed timesheet traces back to the scanned punch card behind it, so a question about any number is answered with the source, not a guess.