Danny Schulz

Confessions of a Payroll Director: Sometimes, I lose sleep over someone else’s paycheck. Not because I messed up. But because what if I missed something? Running payroll means precision under pressure, every week, without fail. It means constantly translating laws into logic, people into processes, and chaos into consistency. Here’s what I wish more people knew: -We notice when someone's paycheck doesn’t look right before they do. -We troubleshoot benefits, taxes, garnishments, and timecards—before coffee. -We never get credit when it’s perfect, but we always hear about it when it’s not. -We see the humans behind the data — and we advocate for them, even if they never know it. And we do it all not just because it’s our job… But because we know someone is counting on us to care AND get it right. #PayrollTruths #PayrollDirectorConfessions #PaydayMatters

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🚨 Payroll & HR Friends — the IRS just updated the retirement limits for 2026, and it’s time to get those systems READY. The IRS dropped Notice 2025-67 with all the new numbers, and while the headlines are all about the high-earner Roth catch-up change, don’t sleep on the rest of these limits. But first — the big clarification everyone’s been waiting on: 👉 The original high-earner Roth catch-up threshold of $145,000 for 2025 FICA wages has officially been increased to $150,000. If your systems, plan docs, or benefits portals still say $145k… go ahead and hit that update button. This change matters for 2026 catch-up processing. Now, let’s talk limits, because 2026 is doing a full glow-up: 📈 2026 Retirement Plan Limits (From IRS Notice 2025-67) • 401(k), 403(b), 457(b) Elective Deferral Limit: $24,500 • Catch-Up Contribution (Age 50+): $8,000 • High-Earner Roth Catch-Up Threshold: $150,000 (based on 2025 FICA wages) • Annual Compensation Limit (401(a)(17)): $375,000 • Defined Contribution Annual Additions Limit (415(c)): $70,000 • Highly Compensated Employee (HCE) Threshold: $165,000 • Key Employee Officer Comp Threshold: $235,000 • SIMPLE IRA Elective Deferral: $17,000 • SIMPLE IRA Catch-Up: $3,500 Payroll friends… this is the time of year when systems, plan specs, and year-end setups start fighting for our attention like it’s the Black Friday of compliance. 💡 My advice: • Update your retirement configuration settings • Review your high-earner populations for 2026 planning • Communicate early with clients and leadership so everyone’s speaking the same language • And please—double-check those plan documents before someone screenshots something outdated 👀 Retirement season is coming whether we’re ready or not… so let’s make sure we are. Source: https://lnkd.in/er9tdRsB #ThatPayrollGuy #PAYOSNC #RetirementPlans #Secure20 #OBBBA #PayrollProfessionals #HRCommunity #ComplianceReady

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Most payroll implementations don’t fail because of the technology. They fail because nobody was fully honest at the beginning. Discovery gets rushed. Timelines get set before the real complexity is understood. Local workarounds get ignored. And payroll gets treated like a system change instead of an operating model change. After 20+ years working across global payroll implementations, I’ve learned that the most successful projects aren’t the fastest ones. They’re the ones that invest time upfront in discovery, data readiness, and rigorous parallel payroll runs. Enterprise payroll is rarely simple. Multiple entities. Different compliance requirements. Years of processes layered on top of each other through acquisitions and regional practices. If that complexity isn’t surfaced early, it will appear later and usually during parallel runs or just before go-live. This blog by Daniel Mellor shares the five phases we typically use when approaching enterprise payroll implementations at Deel, and why getting the early stages right makes the biggest difference. Worth a read if you're managing payroll across multiple countries and considering a platform change. https://lnkd.in/dGSggUHD #GlobalPayroll #PayrollImplementation #EnterprisePayroll #PayrollCompliance #HRTech

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Earlier this week, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law delivering critical updates that every payroll leader needs to navigate proactively. Key payroll impacts include: ✅ Extension & modification of TCJA provisions – making prior tax changes permanent moving forward. ✅ New tax exemptions and credits – driving payroll system changes and revised pay modeling. ✅ Retroactive provisions to January 1, 2025 – requiring immediate compliance reviews and potential corrections. ✅ Removal of taxation on overtime & tips – A crucial point of confusion for employees: OBBBA confirms that payroll must continue taxing overtime premiums and tips as usual, including Social Security and Medicare taxes. The Act instead provides tax credits for federal withholding only that employees will claim when filing personal returns. ✅ Future IRS guidance anticipated – agility will be key as further rules emerge. Action Steps for Payroll Leaders: 🔎 Run a legislative gap analysis to identify impacted pay elements and processes. 🛠️ Engage your vendors swiftly to ensure systems can handle both retroactive adjustments and new reporting requirements. 📣 Prioritize proactive employee communication, especially around overtime, tips taxation, and potential credits, to manage expectations and reduce downstream questions. Payroll leaders should be working NOW to proactively communicate to employees that we are still required to withhold taxes to prevent employees from mistakenly expecting higher net pay immediately. Also, if your systems do not already break out the overtime premium separately from straight time, you will need to implement that reporting change now. At the end of the day, Payroll’s work directly impacts people’s lives and financial confidence. OBBBA underscores why we must stay vigilant, agile, and deeply connected to the employees we serve, every single pay cycle. #Payroll #OBBBA #TaxReform #EmployeeWellbeing #PayrollStrategy

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The biggest ROI from payroll isn’t in cost savings. It’s in protecting the business from risk that destroys shareholder value.   Pete A. Tiliakos pointed me to the 2025 Payroll Profession Confidence Index, which, finally, quantifies what many CHROs overlook:   When executives treat payroll as strategic infrastructure, the ROI comes from strategic impacts, not just cutting costs. Boards scrutinize every HR technology purchase, yet the function that moves more money daily than any other, i.e, payroll, rarely gets the same strategic lens. That’s like upgrading your office Wi-Fi while ignoring the locks on the front door.   If your people strategy depends on attracting and retaining talent, but you haven’t assessed payroll’s strategic ROI, you’re running the race with untied shoelaces.   Pete's research and ROI scorecard should be mandatory reading for CHROs and CFOs alike.   Read it, then tell me: What’s the one metric you’d put on your board dashboard for payroll’s strategic value? https://lnkd.in/d5A6ZZ_J ---- #CHROs #CFOs #Globalpayroll

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👉 The Hidden Shift Happening in Payroll 👈 There’s a quiet shift happening in the payroll world… and only a handful of providers have caught on. For years, payroll companies focused on retention through service: ✔️ Faster & more support ✔️ Better pricing But today? That’s the bare minimum. It doesn’t create differentiation, and it definitely does not drive new revenue. The real battleground has moved to ecosystem ownership. Payroll companies who control the HR tools & HR products, HR partners, HR services, and the experiences surrounding payroll, are turning their platform into a recurring revenue machine. Not by changing what they do… but by monetizing what they enable.. The takeaway: ➡️ Payroll alone is a commodity. ➡️ The marketplace is the moat. ➡️ The ecosystem is the future. So here’s the real strategic question every payroll leader should be asking: Are we building a product - or are we building a platform? Because the companies building platforms… they are the ones making $60M+ per year in revenue that most others are missing. And that’s exactly what we built Marbles to unlock - so payroll companies can own the ecosystem before their competitors do. #Payroll #MarketplaceStrategy #EcosystemEconomy #RevenueGrowth #MarblesHR #HRTech #InnovationLeadership #HR #HRtech #HRmarketplace #HRappstore

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Who changed the Offer BP last week? Silence. Panic. No audit trail. That’s when the real problem starts. In Workday, you don’t always realize a config change has broken something… until it’s live in Production. → Terminations routed to the wrong HR Partner → Offers auto-approving with outdated comp packages → Security policies loosened without a trace → And no idea who did it, when, or how to roll back The root cause? Poor version control in Business Process configuration. Admins can’t track who edited what. -No built-in rollback. -No Git-style history. -And when SOX or GDPR auditors knock… you better have answers. So what’s the fix? Workday’s audit framework is powerful, but only if you know how to use it. Here’s how top teams build real change control ⬇️ ✅ 1. Tag what matters -Use Audit Tags to track BPs, reports, integrations, and security groups. -Changes to tagged objects are auto-logged with user, time, before/after values. ✅ 2. Turn on Configuration Change Tracker -Came in 2024R2, this native tool logs changes across your tenant. -You get a full diff of modified objects, ready to migrate or rollback. ✅ 3. Package, don’t click -Build Configuration Packages in Sandbox. -Migrate via Object Transporter (OX 2.0) instead of direct edits. -Each migration has a changelog, diff preview, and traceability. ✅ 4. Test in the right tenant -Use Implementation for development, Sandbox for testing, Preview for release validation. -Never build in Production. Ever. ✅ 5. Report like an auditor -Run delivered reports: → Audit Trail by Object → Business Process Definition Audit → Security Group Audit -Schedule weekly snapshots and store version records. ✅ 6. Wrap it in a ticketing process -Link every change to a JIRA or ServiceNow request. -No config gets deployed unless it’s reviewed and approved. -Track the “why” behind every “what.” ✅ 7. Document rollback steps -Workday doesn’t have Ctrl+Z. -But you can reverse changes using stored config packages or manual reversion. Still waiting for Workday to build true version control? Don’t. You already have the tools. You just need the discipline. Because in Workday, the most dangerous config isn’t a bad one. It’s the one no one remembers changing.

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How does #payroll and #hr need to set itself up for its #oneshingingmoment to better serve #executives, #employees, and even itself? The #answers (and other data) are found in HR.com's Future of Payroll 2025 research report and recommendations by the HR Research Institute. It was a fun project to be a part of as I had the opportunity to be a subject-matter advisor on the project. It can be found here: https://web.hr.com/3rq05

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Payroll teams are being asked to tolerate things they’d never accept in any other business-critical system. If your finance platform failed, it would be treated as an emergency. If your CRM broke for six weeks, it would be escalated immediately. But when payroll software fails? Too often it’s treated like “a ticket”.   Recent conversations across the #HR and #payroll space have highlighted a pattern that’s becoming far too common: payroll-blocking issues sitting with engineering for weeks, unclear timelines, limited workarounds, and support responses that don’t match the urgency of people needing to be paid.   And the part that frustrates payroll leaders the most is simple: The vendor isn’t accountable for the outcome. Payroll teams are.   That means late nights. Manual reconciliations. Spreadsheet validation. Running parallel processes just to make sure employees are paid correctly and on time.   Employees don’t care about your HRIS roadmap or product backlog. They care about their pay.   No platform is perfect. Implementation challenges happen. But if a payroll provider can’t respond urgently to payroll-critical issues, then it’s not a payroll solution, it’s a liability.   Payroll is not a feature. Payroll is compliance, governance, trust and business continuity. If your payroll system breaks and the answer is “engineering is investigating”… that should be unacceptable.   👉 Payroll leaders: what’s the worst “support response” you’ve received when something payroll-critical broke?   #HRYech #HRIS

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𝗘-𝗩𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗧𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝗨𝗻𝗮𝘃𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲: What Employers and Workday Users Need to Know As of October 1, 2025, E-Verify is temporarily unavailable due to a lapse in Department of Homeland Security appropriations and statutory authority. This impacts both employer operations and Workday integrations. Here's a breakdown of what’s paused, what’s still required, and how to navigate this disruption. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗖𝗮𝗻’𝘁 𝗗𝗼 𝗪𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗘-𝗩𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗜𝘀 𝗗𝗼𝘄𝗻 Employers Can𝗡𝗢𝗧: - Enroll in E-Verify or create new cases - View, edit, or take action on existing cases - Manage user accounts or reset passwords - Run reports or access account info E-Verify customer support is also closed, meaning: No phone/email, No Self Check and myE-Verify *𝗧𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗗𝗛𝗦 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗘𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗿𝘀* - To reduce disruption:  🌟 The “three-day rule” for creating E-Verify cases is 𝘀𝘂𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗲𝘀.  🌟 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗺 𝗜-𝟵 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗱 within three business days of the employee’s start date.  🌟 Employees with Social Security Admin 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝗶𝘁 until E-Verify resumes to resolve them.  🌟 Employers may 𝗡𝗢𝗧 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗲𝘀 due to interim case status. 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗱𝗮𝘆'𝘀 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲: 𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗕𝘆𝗽𝗮𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Workday strongly advises against changing Business Process configurations to bypass the E-Verify integration step. Doing so disables the Retry E-Verify Submission task. 𝗢𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗘-𝗩𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝘀, 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 - Manual / Bulk 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁-𝗦𝗵𝘂𝘁𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁: 𝗠𝗮𝘀𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 Once the shutdown ends: - You’ll need to manually run the integration for anyone hired during the lapse. - Build or repurpose a new hire report that filters by hire date range to identify all impacted workers. You can only progress certain cases directly on the E-Verify website:  1. Photo match  2. Duplicate case  3. Data verification 𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗻 𝗜-𝟵'𝘀: Forms I-9 with validation errors (e.g., invalid document number or incorrect SSN) cannot be resubmitted in bulk. Forms I-9 for employees with multiple positions across companies who self-initiate the Complete Form I-9 task (outside Onboarding or Manage Form I-9 Assignment processes) are excluded from mass resubmission. 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 This is a critical moment for HR, compliance, and Workday teams to stay aligned. While E-Verify is paused, Form I-9 compliance remains mandatory. Use this time to review your processes, ensure your Workday domains are properly configured, and prepare for a smooth restart once services resume. #Workday #EVerify #HRCompliance #WorkdayTips #GovernmentShutdown #WorkdayIntegration #EmpoweredbyWorkday

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Why SLA Metrics Matter in Payroll – Especially for Key Clients In payroll, precision and timeliness are non-negotiable. That’s where SLA (Service Level Agreement) metrics come in — they’re not just numbers, they’re a commitment to excellence. Here’s why SLA metrics are critical, especially for Platinum and Gold clients: Ensure Timely & Accurate Payrolls Drive Accountability Across Teams Enhance Client Trust & Satisfaction Monitor Performance & Efficiency Ensure Statutory Compliance Highlight Bottlenecks Before They Escalate Enable Continuous Process Improvement In a world where every pay cycle counts, SLA metrics are the pulse of a high-performing payroll process. #Payroll #SLAMetrics #ClientSuccess #PayrollExcellence #ProcessImprovement #Compliance #CustomerExperience #Mynd Vivek Misra Dinesh Sharma Sh. Ibu Meitei Yatin Chadha Tamal Kanti Ghosh CA Anup Singh Amit Bhalla Saurav Wadhwa

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