50-Location Casual Dining Group.
From 14 hours to 1.5.
A multi-unit casual dining operator running NCR Aloha and their HR/payroll platform across 50 locations and three brands. Payroll, tip reconciliation, and employee setup , all manual. Here's what changed.
The Situation
When the payroll director came to MAD Software, the operation had grown to 50 locations across three distinct casual dining brands. All three ran NCR Aloha. All three ran employee records through a central HRIS. And none of the three had an automated path between the two.
Every pay period, the payroll team pulled NCR Insight exports from each location manually, merged them into a master spreadsheet, ran their own validation checks against a checklist, formatted the output to their HRIS import spec, and uploaded it. Start to finish: 14 hours of payroll prep, every two weeks.
Tips were handled separately. Each location manager submitted a tip reconciliation report by email on Monday morning. If a manager was out, the report was late. If the format was wrong, it came back for correction. The team was processing 50 manual tip reports every payroll period, on top of the labor data work.
The Discovery Workshop
MAD Software and the operator's HR, payroll, and IT leads ran a two-hour discovery session. The outputs were:
- HRIS export specification and field mapping confirmed
- NCR Insight extract format verified for all three brand configurations
- Tip type configuration documented, four tip categories across the three brands, each with different distribution rules
- Earning code mapping built: 12 job codes to 7 HR/payroll earning codes
- Pay period structure confirmed: bi-weekly, closing on Sunday
- Security requirements documented: SSO via Azure AD, location-level access scoping for brand-level payroll admins
What Went Live
Week 8: Service 1 (Employee Demographics) and Service 2 (Schedule Synchronization) went live. New hires entered in their HR platform began appearing in NCR Aloha within minutes instead of the next morning. Schedules from the operator's scheduling system pushed to the POS for clock-in validation.
Pay period 3: Service 3 (Payroll Automation) went live on a bi-weekly pay boundary. The first automated payroll run processed 47 locations with 1,247 employees. Three exceptions were surfaced by the validation engine, two were resolved in 20 minutes; one required a source correction in NCR. The pay file generated and delivered in 11 minutes.
Pay period 4: Service 4 (Tip Pool & Share) went live. The 50 manual Monday morning tip reports stopped that day. Tips from all 50 locations now deliver to their payroll platform automatically, every night, mapped to the correct earning codes for each brand's tip configuration.
"The first payroll period after Services 3 and 4 went live, I had 12 hours back in my week. I spent 90 minutes reviewing three exception records instead of building the file. That's what I wanted, to be reviewing, not building."
One Year On
The operator has since added 6 locations without any change to the payroll process. The validation engine runs each period against 56 locations and surfaces exceptions, typically 0 to 4, for review. The payroll director reviews exceptions; she no longer touches the file itself.
The compliance audit the operator completed in Q1 of 2025 required the payroll team to produce full audit trails for four pay periods across two brands. The MAD Software audit log produced the complete record, every exception, every approval, every file delivery, in under 10 minutes.
Running a similar operation?
Contact MAD Software to discuss what this deployment looks like for your footprint, your platforms, and your pay period structure.
Schedule the Discovery Call →