Payroll appears in Finance as an approval surface. The run itself is prepared in People HQ, and this is where it is signed off.
That split is deliberate and worth understanding, because it decides where to go when something is wrong.
The division
People HQ owns the run. Who is included, what they are paid, deductions, allowances, the arithmetic.
Finance approves it. Whether it goes out.
Nothing is calculated in Finance. What you see here is the prepared run, and the decision is binary.
Why it is split
Payroll is the largest single payment most organisations make and the one with the least room for error.
Separating preparation from approval means two people see it, which is the ordinary control for any payment of that size. Somebody who both prepares and approves their own payroll run has no control at all, however careful they are.
It also puts the approval where the money is understood. The person checking whether the organisation can afford the run this month is a finance person, not the person who assembled it.
What to check before approving
The total against last period. A run materially different from the last one has a reason, and you want to know it before rather than after.
The headcount. More people than expected, or fewer, is the fastest signal that something in the preparation is wrong.
Anybody who left. A leaver still in a run is the most common and most awkward error.
Anybody who joined. A starter missing from a run is the other one, and it is worse: they notice.
One-offs. Bonuses, adjustments and back-pay should each have a reason somebody can state.
That is a five-minute check and it catches almost everything that goes wrong with payroll.
Reading the run
The approval view shows the run as a whole with the detail behind it.
Look at the summary first and the detail only where the summary raises a question. A payroll run read line by line takes an hour and finds less than five minutes spent on totals, headcount and exceptions, because the errors that matter are almost always visible at the top.
What approving does
The run is released, and it posts to the ledger.
The posting is automatic and goes through the same mapping layer as everything else, so payroll cost lands in the accounts your chart of accounts says it should.
Before the run reaches you
Most of what goes wrong in payroll is decided before the approval, in People HQ.
Knowing that changes what to do with a suspicion. A number that looks wrong is a question for whoever prepared it, and the answer is almost always a change made mid-period: a starter, a leaver, a rate change, a one-off.
Asking is faster than investigating, and the person who prepared it can usually answer in a sentence.
What is not here
Payslips, which employees see in their own profile.
Deduction configuration, which lives with the payroll setup in People HQ.
Employer contributions, which are part of the run's preparation rather than its approval.
If a figure looks wrong, the fix is upstream in People HQ. Approving a run you believe is wrong, intending to correct it afterwards, is considerably harder than rejecting it now: a released run has been paid, and unwinding a payment is a different order of problem from re-preparing one.
Who should approve it
Somebody senior enough that their approval means something, and not the person who prepared it.
In a small organisation that is frequently the founder, and that is fine. What is not fine is the same person preparing and approving, which removes the control entirely regardless of how carefully they work.
Where the usual approver is unavailable, the deputy should be agreed in advance and recorded in the approval policy rather than decided on the morning of a payroll deadline.
Rejecting
A run sent back needs a reason specific enough to act on.
"Total looks high" is not actionable. "Three people appear twice" is. The person who prepared it cannot see what you noticed, and payroll deadlines are unforgiving, so a vague rejection costs a day.
What you are actually signing
A payroll approval is the largest single financial authorisation most people in an organisation ever give.
It is worth holding that in mind against how quickly it can be clicked. Everything else in the queue is recoverable; a payroll run that goes out wrong reaches every employee at once and cannot be recalled.
That asymmetry is the argument for the five-minute check, and it is why this article exists separately from the queue.
Timing
Payroll has a date, and the approval has to happen before it.
Two habits. Approve early rather than on the deadline, because a rejection needs time to fix. And agree who approves when the usual person is away, before it is needed rather than on the morning.
Where the money actually goes
Approving releases the run in the platform. Whether the payment leaves your bank is a banking action, not a NearSync one.
Worth being explicit because it is a genuine gap in people's mental model. The platform records what was approved, posts it to the accounts, and produces what employees see. It does not move money.
Records afterwards
An approved run is a permanent record: who was in it, what each person received, and who approved it.
That is the thing an auditor asks for, and it is the reason approving through the platform rather than by email is worth the extra step. An approval in an inbox is not evidence of anything six months later.
The one thing worth repeating
Never approve payroll as part of clearing a queue.
Every other item in the approval queue can be worked quickly. This one deserves its own five minutes with the numbers in front of you, because it is the only item where the consequence of being wrong reaches everybody in the organisation at once.
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