How a 45-Person Chicago Restaurant Group Cut Payroll Prep Time by 68%

Business: Multi-location restaurant group, Chicago, Illinois, United States. 45 employees across three locations, mix of front-of-house and back-of-house hourly staff. The problem: The payroll coordinator was spending four to five hours before every biweekly payroll reconciling paper sign-in sheets across three locations. Shift supervisors submitted their sheets by email, formatting was inconsistent and missing entries were common. The average payroll cycle included two or three corrections. Late arrivals went untracked unless a manager happened to notice. Leave requests were approved over text messages with no running balance record, which created disputes every quarter when employees thought they had more PTO than the records showed. The solution: Certiva Workforce Control deployed across all three locations in one week. Employees clock in and out on shared tablets at each location. Supervisors receive a live dashboard showing attendance status for their shift without calling anyone. Leave requests go through the app with automatic balance tracking. Exceptions (late arrivals, no-shows, early departures) are flagged in real time and routed to the shift supervisor for same-day resolution. The payroll export includes every verified, exception-resolved record organized by pay period. The results: Payroll prep time dropped from 4.5 hours per cycle to 80 minutes. a 68 percent reduction. Payroll corrections went to zero after the second cycle. The payroll coordinator reports spending most of that 80 minutes on review and approval rather than data reconciliation. Late arrivals are now addressed by supervisors the same day rather than showing up as a pattern weeks later. Leave disputes dropped to zero because every request and approval is timestamped in the system. The restaurant group also reports better shift coverage because managers can see current attendance status across all three locations from their phone. Key takeaway: The payroll problem was not a payroll software problem. It was an attendance data problem. Fixing the data capture fixed everything downstream. Ready to see what this looks like for your restaurant operation? Book a demo and we will walk through the shift and payroll workflow with your actual locations and team structure. Related reading: Attendance tracking software vs. spreadsheets covers why manual methods break down past 10 employees. Certiva vs. Homebase compares Certiva to the most common alternative for restaurant and retail teams.