The City of Moose Jaw had to issue physical paycheques to seven employees after the transition from a manual payroll system to a digital program experienced hiccups.
City hall introduced the program on Jan. 1, with pay later issued covering the period of Dec. 16 to 31, 2019. Under the collective bargaining agreement, hourly employees are the first to be paid — on the seventh and 21st of each month — followed by salaried employees on the 15th and 30th of the month.
Some hourly employees discovered on Jan. 7 that, because of glitches in the new system, they had been shorted hundreds of dollars or had to receive a physical paycheque.
The hiccups were due to processes and setup errors with the system, specifically, the incorrect entry of data and mislabelling of information, communications manager Craig Hemingway told the Express on Jan. 9.
“Nothing major … . It’s a pretty large-scale process to move over to a new system and we anticipated that there would be a few glitches upon launching,” he said.
The goal was not to leave anyone short of pay, Hemingway stated. The hope was for everything to have gone smoothly. However, city administration anticipated that hiccups could happen, so it was prepared to issue cheques or issue pay retroactively by the next pay period.
“We’re positive we’re going to have these things rectified in short order … ,” he added.
Al Bromley, director of human resources, was adamant that there was no problem with the system. In a followup email, he explained that this was the first of two pay runs of a new payroll program that replaced an antiquated one, so there would be glitches to find and fix. There are challenges with the configuration of any new system, so some adjustment was required for employees in various departments.
“We are collaborating to immediately address any pay issues that are brought to our attention. No city manager approval is required to correct pay issues … ,” he said. “This is an internationally acclaimed HRIS/payroll system that the city is excited to implement and we have worked closely with Ceridian for the last 13 months in preparation.”
As part of the switch to the new payroll system, all the personal information of about 400 municipal employees had to be moved over. Information on hourly employees was transitioned over first, followed by the information for salaried staff.
The municipality moved to a new program called Ceridian Dayforce, a system that city council approved for $80,400 during a council meeting on Nov. 26, 2018. It replaced a system that was simply old fashioned since it still used paper and employee time cards were punched in manually, said Hemingway.
With Ceridian Dayforce, city hall has now moved into a new era where time cards and schedules are all handled electronically. Employees can request time off, track their benefits, and monitor other personal information — all online.
“That’s the huge advantage, in time and paper and so many other things,” he added.
City administration believes the problem has been fixed but is still monitoring the program to be sure, Hemingway said. Since this is a new system, employees and managers are still learning how to use it; this is where data entry errors likely occurred.
“Change is always difficult and never seamless when you’re moving over to a new system,” he continued. “We had to migrate data from a 1990s’ system to something cutting edge, so we expected and planned for issues. We’ve been diligent in addressing those immediately and ensuring everybody got paid.”
It was a tremendous job to switch over everything, while the implementation team put in much time and effort to ensure it happened, Hemingway added. It’s unfortunate that this happened, but the team anticipated possible teething troubles and believes it avoided any major issues.
