Regional Bank Cuts Payroll Calculation Time by 90% and Eliminates Payment Errors

Introduction

This regional bank serves customers across multiple states with approximately 1,900 employees—75% based in California. The VP of Benefits has been with the organization for nearly five years, managing leave of absence administration.

When she joined, the team was already using AbsenceSoft for leave management. But one critical piece remained manual: payroll calculations for employees on leave. With 40 to 50 employees on leave during any given pay period, the payroll team handled calculations by hand—a manageable process when the team had nine members. That changed in March 2024.

Challenge

When a team of nine becomes two

In March 2024, the bank migrated payroll administration to a managed services provider, reducing the internal payroll team from nine people to just two. While the new provider took over many functions, they could not handle leave of absence related payment calculations.

The impact was immediate. “We were seeing a huge increase in errors in payroll calculations—missed payments, wrong payments, even though we were sending over all the same data,” the VP of Benefits explained.

When she met with the payroll manager, she learned the manual process was taking 16 hours every two weeks:

• Manually calculating California SDI by copying quarterly wages and entering them into the state website
• Tracking calculations in spreadsheets with no automation
• Typing hours manually into individual timesheets for every pay code
• No way to catch errors before they reached employees

Under California law, payment errors carry a penalty of $100 per day per employee. Beyond financial risk, errors were damaging trust during vulnerable moments in their employees’ lives.

Solution

From spreadsheets to automation

The VP of Benefits spent three months building an Excel calculator that helped reduce errors, but it had limitations: it couldn’t track PTO balances, required extensive documentation for the payroll team to use, and didn’t scale to handle new state programs.

When AbsenceSoft announced a Payroll Calculations module, she immediately applied for early access.

The module transforms how leave payroll works. It pulls data directly from leave cases and paid policies in AbsenceSoft, automatically calculating payments based on date ranges, state requirements, and company policies. The platform handles complex scenarios that would take hours to calculate manually: employees in multiple states, leaves starting or ending mid-pay period, and coordination with state disability payments.

With the AbsenceSoft Compliance Engine tracking changing regulations across states, the bank no longer needs to manually research payment rules for each new state program either.

Results

From 16 hours to under 2

The Payroll Calculations module cut biweekly payroll time from 16 hours to just 1 to 2 hours—an 87% reduction.

“This is what they want, 100%,” the VP of Benefits said when asked what she’d tell other HR leaders. “It’s such a time saver. It takes all the manual work out because we are all prone to errors. But if you have software to help you, you can spend that time just validating and making sure that the payments are correct versus just calculating. And oh my gosh, payroll is due, I don’t know if I have time to review.”

The time savings tell only part of the story. Automated calculations eliminate the manual errors that were causing payment mistakes and exposing the bank to California’s $100-per-day penalty for payment errors. The module handled every complex scenario tested—employees in multiple states, leaves starting mid-pay period, paid leave expiring mid-pay period, and various PTO integration choices. With 16 states now having paid leave programs and more launching soon, the bank is ready. “Once we get our first Minnesota leave, if we have AbsenceSoft, I don’t think we need to worry about it,” she said.