Buying stage: diagnosis, finding out what is wrong
When entitlement, sickness and pay figures stop agreeing, the balance is rarely where the problem lives. In a Unit4 system the drift starts upstream. Five areas can be checked without touching a balance.
Absence is the Unit4 module where policy decision, payroll rule and reporting definition must agree: codes, categories and grouping, special leave reasons, and the sickness, paid leave, annual leave and statutory schemes over them.
Work schedules sit beneath all of it, and a failed load is where drift most often starts.
Absence codes multiply for good reasons: new special leave reasons, scheme changes, statutory additions. Categories and grouping keep the list readable. Most reporting and scheme behaviour is set at category level, not code level.
Any Unit4 system should yield two lists: current active and closed absence codes with their categories, and for each active code the scheme it pays under and the report set it lands in. Where two reports of one period disagree, compare the grouping first.
Transfer processing moves an absence from full pay to half pay and then nil pay on trigger points measured over a rolling year. The occupational scheme and the statutory scheme (statutory sick pay, maternity, paternity, adoption, shared parental leave, parental bereavement leave, jury service) meet at that transfer.
Three checks apply there. The system's rolling year should match the policy's. Full-time equivalent should be calculated as the policy intends for part-time and irregular working patterns. Letter automation should fire from the same trigger as the pay change. When the policy changes, one definition is updated and the other is not.
Balance configuration and the holiday calculation are the visible end of absence. Around them sit buy and sell annual leave, absence transfer schemes, absence reversal and the load templates that bring balances in at year start or after migration. Each can change a balance without a person changing it, and needs a named owner and a written rule.
Work schedules need their own pass: when each was last reconciled to the working pattern it represents, and what the last load did. Where a load failed part way, every affected record should have been reprocessed, including those with no visible error. Absence reversal needs its own pass: who can run it, and what record it leaves.
Open absence error resolution is recurring work. An absence that cannot be closed stays open into the next period and sits in both periods' processing.
The check is the trend in the open count. A count that stays level means the errors are carried and no root cause recorded. Treat it as a documentation problem before a configuration one.
A council payroll often runs a schools variant alongside the main payroll: school-specific processing, bursar timesheet and absence load templates, and school-level absence transfer handling. It is a second payroll on the first one's configuration.
Three features need separate checks. The load templates are completed outside the payroll team. Absence transfer is handled at school level. Term-time working patterns live in the work schedule, not the contract. A control that holds on the main payroll may not reach the variant. Settle that before year end.
A council payroll running several pay entities carried manual effort nobody had traced end to end. One of those entities was a schools payroll, the variant described above. An independent system review documented the workflows, specified the fixes and sequenced the remediation options into a phased roadmap with consultancy estimates, for an executive audience.
The remediation roadmap is forecast to save 9,000 administrative hours a year. The system was mapped before any change was proposed.
Absence figures that do not reconcile in a Unit4 system are the usual starting point for a first conversation.
Bear Consulting Services will say where to look first.