When it goes wrong
The error found after the money left, the overpayment, the missed deadline, the person who was not paid.
Nobody elseif the person who does this is away
Somebody Was Paid Too Little
An underpayment is the error with the shortest acceptable response time, because somebody is short of money now and it is your fault.
Somebody Was Paid Too Much
An overpayment is harder than an underpayment, because recovering it depends on somebody else's agreement and on money they may have spent.
Somebody Was Not Paid At All
The worst routine failure in small-business payroll, and the one with the simplest response: fix it today, explain afterwards.
The Filing You Missed
A missed filing produces no immediate signal, which is why it repeats. The correct response is the same in every system: now, openly, and find out the scope.
Money Sent to the Wrong Account
A payment to the wrong account is frequently unrecoverable, usually preventable, and increasingly the result of somebody impersonating an employee.
Telling People It Went Wrong
How a payroll error is communicated matters more than the error. The same mistake can be a non-event or the thing people remember about working there.
Fixing the Cause, Not the Payment
Correcting a wrong payment takes an hour. Correcting what produced it takes ten minutes and is skipped in the relief of having fixed the visible thing.