How Timeero Helps You Spend Less Time on Payroll Prep
Jessica Packard
Last update on:
August 13, 2025 9:37 AM
Published on:
TL;DR
From time consuming data entry to errors and miscalculations, manual payroll prep costs your business money in ways that you can’t always see. With Timeero’s automated time and mileage tracking, you can prevent payroll mistakes and take back your time and revenue.
If you’re like many business owners, just hearing the word “payroll” is enough to make you feel stressed. And it isn’t the actual payroll that’s the problem – it’s the prep that goes into payroll each week.
Chasing down manual timesheets
Correcting mileage logs
Re-entering data across multiple systems
Confirming billable vs. nonbillable hours
It’s clear manual payroll management is often a labor-intensive and error-prone process.
In this guide, we’ll explore the real cost of inefficient payroll prep and how Timeero can help you save time and money with payroll automation.
Manual payroll prep is costing you time and accuracy.
Let’s face it, manually prepping for payroll each week is tedious work. Not to mention, the practice comes with hidden expenses that can eat away your time and profits.
In this section, we’ll look at 4 ways manual payroll prep impacts your business.
Time lost to manual data entry and corrections
No matter how detail-oriented and attentive you might be, manually entering information into a spreadsheet or recording hours on paper timesheets has risks.
Most businesses find that outdated manual tracking methods are more expensive than they realized. Typos, miscalculations, formula errors, and attributing hours to the wrong employee are all ways that manual data entry can rob you of your time.
Risk of errors and compliance headaches
Checking for miscalculations and missing data is typically part of the payroll process. Finding errors can be common, but you shouldn’t be spending the majority of your time fixing payroll entries.
If errors were to go unnoticed, the consequences would be significant. Miscalculations often result in overpayments and compliance-related issues like late filings, misclassifications, and missed reimbursements expose your business to fines and audits.
Employee frustration
If payroll errors are consistent, your employees are bound to become frustrated. One unresolved error can have a huge impact on an employee’s paycheck.
Each time there is a payroll error, your employees have to ask HR to fix their paychecks. The more this happens, the more likely they are to seek employment elsewhere.
Opportunity costs of administrative overhead
Manually preparing for payroll each week consists of printing reports, calculating work hours, and even securing receipts to verify expenses. Just think – the time you’re spending gathering payroll data could be spent growing your business.
According to product developers Envision Digital Pty Ltd, HR departments that rely on manual processes spend 60-70% of their time on administrative tasks. With all that bandwidth gone, there’s very little opportunity for improving operations, reviewing candidates for new openings, or investing in training and development for your workers.
Why do payroll prep issues happen?
In most cases, companies experiencing issues with payroll prep are using manual tracking methods.
Before we get into how we can solve payroll prep issues, let’s take a look at three specific reasons why they happen in the first place.
Disconnected systems
Many organizations use multiple apps and tools to track mileage, record time, and process payroll. Switching between each platform to complete payroll (e.g., exporting sheets, copying data from one system to another) delays the approval process and increases risk of human error.
Inaccurate or incomplete time & mileage tracking
If you use paper timesheets or record mileage in spreadsheets, the data you report is only as accurate as the individual submitting it.
Employees may submit estimated odometer readings instead of actual mileage or they may forget to record mandatory meal and rest breaks, which means you’ve now exposed your business to a host of compliance risks.
Lacking an audit trail or GPS verification
Manual payroll systems lack GPS verification, which means there is no way to verify that work was performed as claimed. This lack of transparency can lead to client billing disputes as well as employee conflict.
How to simplify payroll prep with Timeero
Manual payroll management costs time and money. However, more “spot-check” solutions aren’t the answer. Instead, you need a smart, unified tool that will automate every task involved in your payroll, and save you time and effort.
Here are some of the ways Timeero can expand your HR bandwidth every pay period, and transform your payroll system for the better.
Automated time and mileage tracking
View employees’ time and mileage entries as well as driving routes.
When employees track time and mileage manually, they are bound to make mistakes. Whether intentional or not, time and mileage tracking errors are extremely costly.
With Timeero, time and mileage are tracked automatically as soon as employees push “start” on the time clock. Every punch is GPS-verified, timestamped, and visible via the admin dashboard.
Additionally, an employee timesheet is created as soon as the app begins tracking work hours.
With automatic time and mileage tracking, you can eliminate manual odometer readings, paper timesheets, and complex spreadsheet calculations.
Real-time GPS tracking and geofencing technology
Draw custom geofences around job sites to prevent time theft.
Timeero allows you to draw custom geofences around job sites to prevent “buddy punching” and other instances of time theft for accurate payroll.
Employees are prevented from being able to clock in unless they are located within the geofenced boundary. This eliminates time rounding (commonly seen in companies that use manual timekeeping methods) and serves to confirm that employees are being paid for work that was actually performed.
Seamless integration with payroll systems
Timeero offers integrations with multiple payroll providers.
To simplify payroll, Timeero allows you to integrate with many popular payroll systems, such as:
With one click, you can export employees’ tracked time and mileage data for quick and easy payroll.
Compliance support for peace of mind
Prepare for audits with detailed history logs.
Timeero’s audit logs show recorded clock ins/outs, as well as all added, edited, or deleted timesheets. The software’s detailed audit logs are designed to help you ensure compliance with DCAA, DOL, and EVV regulations, while minimizing the need for manual admin tasks.
By recording this data, you’ll have a verifiable bank of evidence for every hour worked at your business. This keeps your record-keeping aligned with federal and state regulations, Department of Labor wage-and-hour requirements, and other mandates.
Streamlined reporting
View employees’ scheduled vs. actual hours worked.
If you need to pull data on employee hours and travel expenses, Timeero makes it easy to generate real-time custom reports.
View employee timesheets, overtime hours worked, billable vs. nonbillable hours, as well as expenses conveniently from the admin dashboard. This means no more searching through files and spreadsheets to get the data you need for payroll.
Manual payroll prep can be a silent killer for businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re spending too much time gathering data or encountering consistent payroll errors, Timeero can help. Through GPS tracking technology and seamless payroll integration, you can eliminate costly mistakes and save hours each month on payroll.
“I love this app because I no longer have to use paper timesheets and go on the honor system when it comes to employees (which can become problematic when trusting people to be honest about hours worked). I'm able to click the app and see who is on the clock and where! It also makes payroll so much easier. I find Timeero to be the best app for my business - as I tried several different ones but Timeero beat them all!” Nicole L., Consumer services
Don’t let outdated manual processes limit your business’s potential.
Jessica Packard is a B2B SaaS content strategist lead who helps companies turn SEO and content into real growth. With a mix of creativity and data-driven thinking, she builds strategies that drive traffic, generate leads, and make content a core part of the business.
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