The Tuesday Problem: Field Timecard → Payroll

When payroll runs clean, nobody throws a party.

If it breaks… everyone notices. With profanity. The creative kind.

Every week, someone in your company has to make sure people get paid.

That’s the stakes. Every Tuesday.

The obvious move was to digitize timecards. Capture time at the jobsite. Replace paper with an app. Faster. Better. No brainer.

And still, the promised gains rarely show up where it counts.

Hard-fought efficiency won in the field gets drained in the office. Someone is still poring over spreadsheets, hunting errors, re-keying data — doing whatever it takes to make sure the yelling doesn’t start.

We’re not talking hours. Days.

Every week.

Tens of thousands in lost productivity.

And one person who can’t take a vacation.

The payroll administrator.

Labor is the heartbeat of the operation. It’s where margin is made—or bled.

And it’s the one information flow that never gets to slip.

Nobody asks why. They ask who.

So if you want the truth about your project information, don’t stare at your ConTech stack.

Look at Tuesday. (Or Wednesday without the safety net.)

If Tuesday is a war room, you’re not running a process. You’re running a rescue mission.

The payroll admin is the one person who knows the whole dance: rate exceptions, union rules, zones, shift extras. Every “who’s on first.” Every “it depends.”

And too often, they’re the only one—because the process lives in their head.

They can’t call in sick on Tuesday. They don’t really vacation. They just change locations.

Because payroll can’t fail.

Under-appreciated. Mission-critical.

Casandra. Kelly. Cathy. Linda. Dawn. Raj. Steve.

These are their stories.

Over the next eight weeks, we’re going to trace labor information from field time to payroll — and share what we see as we operationalize labor data flow across +60 construction operations.

Because every breakdown shows up the same way:

• manual cleanup work

• missing visibility

• burned capacity

• technology that never pays off

Each week: one recurring failure pattern, the costs, and the shift that makes labor data flow reliabily.

This is what Project Information Operations looks like in practice: turning weekly payroll heroics into reliable project intelligence.

Hoping you’ll join us!

—Chris