Finance¶
Who this is for: Finance staff who run payroll, manage cutoffs, and clear approvals. Time: ~15 minutes. You'll need: the Finance module (the $ icon in the left nav).
Finance drives every pay run: opening and closing cutoff periods, pulling employees into a period, adjusting individual invoices, clearing time/reimbursement/dispute/quiz/referral approvals, then processing and sending payslips.
1. The Finance home¶
Open Finance. The hub summarises what needs attention and links to every sub-area.
- The banner tells you whether anything is pending Finance review.
- Open periods shows the current and next cutoff with their due dates.
- Jump to cards: Payroll, Approvals, History, Cutoffs, Records, Settings.
2. Cutoffs — the period lifecycle¶
Open Finance → Cutoffs.
Each period moves through a lifecycle:
SCHEDULED → OPEN → CLOSED
- SCHEDULED → OPEN opens submissions for that period.
- OPEN → CLOSED locks it.
- The day a SCHEDULED period's start date arrives, the system auto-promotes it to OPEN for you.
- The period containing today is flagged. Use the Transition to… dropdown to move a period manually between Scheduled, Open, and Closed.
3. Payroll records — running a period¶
Open Finance → Records (Payroll). Everything for a pay run lives here, on one per-period surface.
- Pick the period (top-left); the submission cutoff countdown is on the right.
- Pull Employees loads all active employees into the period so their tracked hours and pay populate. It confirms first — it creates a draft payroll record for every active employee who doesn't already have one (anyone without an active assignment or rate is skipped).
- Top-level tabs: Payroll (the main run), Approvals, Additionals (the CT/SOT/TMT calculated breakdowns), and Offboarded (final-pay review).
- Inside Payroll, toggle Employees vs External Contractors (a contractor only appears once they have a payout for the period — an affiliate commission from a Sync, or a manual line item).
Keeping a period fresh — Sync & Reset¶
Once employees are pulled, use the Sync split-button to re-materialize auto-calculated pay after any change (commission, coverage, retainers, leave, absences all re-compute on a Sync):
- Sync without Time Doctor — the fast path. Recomputes all the system-owned line items but keeps the hours already pulled.
- Reset (in the dropdown) — destructive: deletes every draft line item, clears notes, and re-pulls from scratch. Use only when a period is badly out of sync.
If a period drifts (a mapping or approval changed after the last Sync), a resync-needed banner appears prompting you to Sync.
The payroll table¶
Each row is one employee's payroll for the period, with a status (see §7), hours, rate, additionals, deductions, and the invoice total. You can:
- Search / filter by status, pay type, or department, and sort any column.
- Select rows (checkboxes) for batch process/send.
- Quick-edit mode (toolbar toggle) makes the Additionals/Deductions and Note cells editable inline for draft rows without opening each record.
- Click a row to open that person's full payroll detail (next section).
4. A single person's payroll & invoice¶
Click any payroll row to open the detail page — one employee's full invoice for the period. This is where you audit and adjust an individual's pay.
The page has:
- Header — name, employee code, period, email, department / role / pay-type badges, and a status badge (Draft / Processing / Executed / Sent).
- Invoice summary card (left) — the invoice total, the Invoice Id
(shows "Not yet processed" until you process it), an hours breakdown
(Time-Doctor hours + any extra hours line items → total hours), the base
(hourly =
hours × rate; fixed = the fixed rate), then Additionals and Deductions grouped by type. Multi-item groups (e.g. per-day commission or CT daily bonus) collapse into one line you can expand to the day level. - Payment snapshot (left) — the bank / crypto payout details captured for this run.
- Note (right) — a rich-text note on the invoice. Edits auto-save (you'll see "Saving…/Saved").
- Line items (right) — add / edit / delete manual additionals and deductions (next section).
- Requests and Disputes (bottom) — the time-adjustment / zoom / quiz requests and any payslip disputes tied to this person, decided inline.
Viewing & downloading the invoice PDF¶
- Once a record is processed, a View Invoice File button (and an eye icon in the table) opens the invoice PDF inline in a new tab.
- Once sent, you also get Download PDF.
The detail page is editable only while the record is a draft. After it's processed or sent it becomes read-only — to change anything you must Convert to draft first (see §7).
5. Line items — manual additionals & deductions¶
On the detail page's Line items panel, click Add item to add a manual adjustment to someone's pay. Each line item is either an Additional (adds to the total) or a Deduction (subtracts).
The form:
- Category — grouped into:
- Additionals: Zoom Reimbursement, Quiz Reward, Referral Bonus, Cover Shift Bonus, Additional Hours.
- Deductions: Absent Deduction, Salary Advance Recovery, Offboarding Proration.
- Other: Custom (free-text) — you type the label and pick the direction (Additional or Deduction) yourself.
- Date — defaults to today.
- Amount (USD) — except for Additional Hours, where you instead enter Hours and the amount auto-computes at the employee's implied hourly rate.
- Notes — optional.
Edit or delete a line item with the pencil / trash icons; deleting warns that it recalculates the payroll total.
System-owned rows can't be hand-edited. Auto-calculated categories — Commission, CT Daily Bonus, SOT commission/coverage, Retainer Fee, Affiliate Commission, and anything created by an approved request/dispute/leave — are owned by the system. They're wiped and rewritten on each Sync, so the category dropdown deliberately omits them and their rows show no edit control. To change those, fix the underlying source (the mapping, the approval, the Time-Doctor hours) and Sync — don't try to patch the line item.
6. Approvals¶
Under Records → Approvals, clear everything that affects a payslip before you process it. There are four tabs, all scoped to the selected period.
Each row opens a decision dialog — the button reads Decide when it's your turn to act, or View when it's already settled or waiting on someone else.
- Requests → Time Adjustments — an employee's claim to correct tracked hours. The row shows the date, the claimed window, and the net hours; the dialog is the finance-stage review. Approving flows the approved hours into that person's pay for the period.
- Requests → Zoom Reimbursements — shows the local amount + currency and the USD equivalent; approving adds a Zoom Reimbursement to the payroll.
- Disputes — payslip disputes; see §8.
- Quiz Winners — CT/SOT quiz-win payouts submitted by managers; the row shows the win date and quiz kind. Approving adds the prize to the winner's payroll.
- Referrals — referral-bonus payouts. Referrals are two-stage: P&C approves first, then it reaches Finance ("awaiting finance"). The dialog states the fixed $100, paid to the referrer 6 months after the referee's hire date; the Finance action is "Approve as Finance · create line item", which posts the bonus onto the referrer's open-period payroll.
Approved requests/quiz/referrals materialize as system-owned line items on the relevant payroll — you won't hand-edit them; re-open the request to change a decision.
7. Processing & sending payslips¶
A payroll record moves through Draft → Processing → Processed → Sent (with a Failed state if PDF generation errors — use Retry).
- Draft — editable; hours, notes, and manual line items can all change.
- Processing — transient while the invoice PDF generates.
- Processed ("Executed") — locked, invoice PDF + Invoice Id generated, no email sent yet.
- Sent — the invoice email has gone to the employee.
Bulk (whole period)¶
From the Payroll tab toolbar:
- Process All — "Lock all draft records and generate invoice PDFs. No emails will be sent." Runs in the background; the table shows live progress.
- Send All — emails the invoice to every processed record.
- Select specific rows first and the buttons become Process Selected (n) / Send Selected (n).
Per person (detail page or row)¶
- Draft → Process.
- Processed → View Invoice File, Send invoice, or Convert to draft.
- Sent → View, Download PDF, Resend email, or Convert to draft.
Convert to draft (fixing after the fact)¶
Convert to draft unlocks a processed/sent record so you can edit it again. If it was already sent, you're warned that re-processing sends a revised invoice under the same invoice number. This is the normal path when a late approval or dispute changes someone's total.
Processing locks the record. Draft edits (line items, notes) are disabled once processed/sent — Convert to draft to reopen. There's no hard gate that forces every approval to be cleared before sending, but a pending-disputes banner and the Disputes column flag anything outstanding, and approving a dispute forces the record back to draft anyway.
8. Disputes¶
An employee can dispute a payslip within its dispute window. Finance settles disputes in two places — the Approvals → Disputes tab (the cross-period queue) and the Disputes section on a person's detail page. Both open the same decision dialog.
A dispute shows the amount in question, the employee's discrepancy details, any attachments, and its status: Open → Approved / Approved with adjustments / Rejected.
Settling an open dispute — pick one:
- Approve — accept the disputed amount in full.
- Approve with adjustments — enter a different Adjusted amount (USD) (prefilled to the disputed amount; must be > 0).
- Reject — decline it. You can add a note for HR/payroll context (the employee doesn't see it).
Approving converts the invoice back to draft. Both approve outcomes add the settled amount to the payroll total and revert the record to draft — you then re-process and re-send. Rejecting doesn't change pay. A settled dispute can be reopened if you need to redo the decision.
The dispute window¶
On the detail page you also control the dispute window itself — its status (Active / Expired / Closed / Revoked), expiry, and reopen count. Use Reopen window to let an employee (re)submit after it closed, or Close window to end the dispute period early.
9. Offboarded employees¶
The Offboarded tab lists people who left mid-cutoff, with their last working day and net total, and a Review invoice shortcut into each record.
Final pay for an offboarded fixed-salary employee is not auto-prorated — the banner tells you to open each invoice and add an Offboarding Proration deduction manually (it's a selectable deduction category on the line-item form). Prorate the salary down to the days actually worked, then process and send as usual.
10. History & settings¶
- Finance → History — past period totals, by department and by employee, for reconciliation and lookups.
- Finance → Settings — the CT Daily Bonus pool rate, validation tolerance, shared roles, and the retainer fee per model (the TMT $150 default lives here).
Shared roles — holders of a shared role jointly count as one active member per model per day, splitting that slot's amount. Use Add role to pick one.
Troubleshooting¶
| Problem | What to do |
|---|---|
| Period won't accept submissions | It's still Scheduled — transition it to Open in Cutoffs |
| Payroll table is empty | Click Pull Employees for that period |
| Someone's hours are missing | Confirm P&C mapped them to a Time Doctor user, then Sync |
| Commission / retainer / bonus looks off | Fix the source mapping, then Sync — those rows are system-owned and rewritten on sync |
| "Resync needed" banner is showing | Something changed since the last sync — click Sync to re-materialize |
| Can't edit a line item | It's system-owned (auto-calculated) — change the source and sync instead |
| Can't edit an invoice at all | It's processed/sent and read-only — Convert to draft first |
| Approved a dispute, now the invoice is draft | Expected — approving adds the amount and reverts to draft; re-process and re-send |
| Offboarded person's final pay is wrong | Open their invoice and add an Offboarding Proration deduction manually |
| Payslip email didn't arrive | Re-open the sent record and use Resend email |