Let’s start with the monetary cost. Business Wire published a survey by Ernst & Young that found one in five payrolls contains errors—requiring the average organization to make 15 corrections per pay period. The average cost of each error as $291, with some errors costing as much as $705.

Those numbers are alarming enough. 

But the consequences can be even more serious. 40% of the organizations surveyed facing costly litigation over payroll errors have resorted to cutting jobs. More than half of those that run into regulatory and compliance issues have also cut jobs. 

Other organizations embroiled in regulatory or compliance problems have been fined (15%); suffered damage to their reputations (36%); and reported declines in employee morale (41%).

It’s easy to understand why employee morale would decline when you see how profound the impact of payroll errors can be. A Morning Consult survey commissioned by Paycom reported that almost 60% of Americans would have trouble paying bills and making purchases if their paychecks were short by $100. That number balloons to 82% if the check is short by $500. 

Fortunately, The Graphite Lab provides automations that can prevent many common payroll errors, saving you time, money, and damage to your reputation.

It starts with calculations that follow your rules, consistently.

Most payroll mistakes happen when your staff is rushed and your rules aren’t applied consistently.

Most trades businesses have pay rules that cover:

• overtime thresholds

• different rates by role or work type

• spiffs or commission logic

• on-call pay

• how to handle PTO and sick time 

• job-based labor allocation for job costing

The power of automation is that it applies your rules the same way every time. It flags edge cases, and routes exceptions for human review. That’s how you reduce mistakes.

Automation creates a simple loop that:

• detects when an approval is needed

• notifies the approver with context

• captures the decision

• logs the decision for audit and reporting

Solving another hidden cost.

It’s called “the second spreadsheet.” And it usually starts when someone asks something like:

• “What did overtime look like by branch?”

• “Are we paying drive time consistently?”

• “Which job types are blowing up our labor hours?”

• “Why did labor percentage spike last month?”

When automation cleanly structures your payroll data, you can answer those questions quickly instead of trying to figure out who authorized what. Our payroll assemblies can do just that.

It’s reasonable to expect 50% less time on payroll tasks.

When payroll is handled manually—especially across multiple branches or growing headcount—wasted hours pile up fast.

We’ve helped our clients cut payroll task time by 50% once approvals, exception handling, and reporting are baked into the workflow instead of scattered across texts, spreadsheets, and last-minute fire drills.

It’s not “set it and forget it,” but it does make payroll predictable. And in the trades, predictable is priceless.