Many payroll departments are fully occupied with processing some kind of payroll every week, and possibly even several times in one week. The latter situation occurs when different groups of employees are paid for different time periods. For example, hourly employees may be paid every week, while salaried employees may be paid twice a month. Processing multiple payroll cycles eats up any spare hours of the payroll staff, leaving them with little time for cleaning up paperwork or researching improvements to its basic operations.

To alleviate this problem, all of the various payroll cycles can be consolidated into a single, companywide payroll cycle. By doing so, the payroll staff no longer has to spend extra time on additional payroll processing, nor does it have to worry about the different pay rules that may apply to each processing period; instead, everyone is treated exactly the same. To make payroll processing even more efficient, it is useful to lengthen the payroll cycles. For example, a payroll department that processes weekly payrolls must run the payroll 52 times a year, whereas one that processes monthly payrolls only does so 12 times per year, which eliminates 75 percent of the processing that the first department must handle. These changes represent an enormous reduction in the payroll-processing time the accounting staff requires.

Review the prospective change with the rest of the management team to make sure that it is acceptable to them. They must buy into the need for the change, because their employees will also be impacted, and the managers will receive complaints about it. This best practice requires a long lead time to implement as well as multiple notifications to the staff about its timing and impact on them. It is also useful to go over the granting of payroll advances with the payroll staff, so that they are prepared for the likely surge in requests for advances.