Cookeville’s overhaul of its municipal payroll operations set to take the next step this month, replacing a paper-based process with an integrated online software system.
City Finance Director Jenni Nisewander said the current manual system requires every department to gather physical paperwork and deliver it to the payroll office every Monday. Nisewander said they are still in the early phases as the transition will move all timekeeping and payroll functions to an online platform that integrates directly into the city’s existing infrastructure.
“It’s going to be hard,” Nisewander said. “There’s a lot of data conversion that has to happen. A lot of new rules have to be written in the software. We have to do a lot of testing and make sure that it does everything as it should.
Nisewander said the new software aims to eliminate the need for staff to manually calculate hours during the start of the work week. Nisewander said the system will also manage employee leave, which is currently tracked with individual spreadsheets and submitted monthly.
“It will save a lot of people time from having to manually calculate time on payroll Mondays, and it’ll also keep our leave on a system rather than having it with paper where they all have to keep it up with spreadsheets and turn it in at the end of the month,” Nisewander said.
Nisewander said the primary solution for the current difficulties is centralizing data into one spot where a single online timekeeping system feeds into the payroll software.
“Right now everything’s on paper, so it will put it all on a system to where we do time keeping online, and payroll will be online rather than on paper,” Nisewander said. “All the departments won’t have to gather paper together and bring it to the payroll department on Mondays of payroll. It will all be online and integrate into our system.”
Nisewander said the project is slated for a 2027 launch to allow enough time for the system to be built and configured. Nisewander said the city will run parallel payrolls in both the old and new systems to ensure the data matches exactly before the transition is finalized.
“We’re being very diligent to make sure we don’t miss anything,” Nisewander said.
Nisewander said the project is currently in the early stages of building the system and performing data conversion.