Labor: Payroll Export — Hours Your Payroll Provider Can Take
Last updated 2026-11-01
From Labor → Reports, export one row per person for a pay period: paid hours, approved work hours, indirect hours, hours pending review and the unexplained remainder — ready to hand to ADP, Gusto or your payroll provider.
Docklify does not run payroll — your payroll provider does. What Docklify owes you is a clean, defensible hours file at the end of each pay period, so nobody re-types numbers from screens into a spreadsheet. The Payroll export on Labor → Reports builds that file from the reconciled figures: the same person-day numbers you can check on the Hours Reconciliation page, added up per person for the period you pick. One row per person, one file per period, ready to hand over.
Step 1: Reconcile the period first#
- Open Labor → Hours Reconciliation, pick the pay period, and work through the list: review pending time entries, complete any missing attendance, and recalculate until the rows left are the ones you can genuinely explain.
- If the period has no reconciliation results at all, the export will stop and tell you to run reconciliation first — it never hands you a silently empty file, and it does not quietly calculate a different set of numbers behind your back.
Step 2: Export the file#
- Open Labor → Reports and find the Payroll export area. It has its own period picker (the month so far, by default) — set it to the pay period you just reconciled, up to about three months at a time.
- Click Download CSV. The file is named with your organization and the period, so the archive of past periods stays readable. A JSON version with the same rows is available for systems that prefer it.
- Send the file to your payroll provider as you normally would. Keep the exported file with the period’s other records — it is the exact snapshot payroll was run from.
Reading the columns#
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Paid hours | Time on the clock for the period, from the attendance daily totals (days the person was present) |
| Productive hours | Approved direct work time only. Hours still waiting for review are not hidden inside this number — they are the next column |
| Indirect hours | Approved indirect time: training, cleaning, maintenance, meetings, count support |
| Pending hours | Time recorded but not yet reviewed by a supervisor. Listed separately on purpose: decide before payroll whether to clear the review queue and re-export, or to let these hours fall into the next period |
| Unexplained hours | What is left of paid time after approved productive and indirect time. While indirect time is not fully recorded yet, this remainder includes it — read it as a figure to review, not as time anyone lost |
| Days present / days with flags | How many days the person was present in the period, and on how many of those days reconciliation raised something worth a look |
| Notes: unfiled | This row’s hours were recorded under an account with no employee file, so the row carries no employee number. Link the file in People and re-export to get a complete row |
An empty cell does not mean zero. If paid, indirect or unexplained hours could not be worked out for even one day of the period — a daily report missing, indirect time not collected that day — the whole column is left empty rather than showing a partial total dressed up as the real one. When you see an empty column, fix the gap (run reconciliation, record the missing time) and export again.
Docklify features used in this article#
- Payroll export area (period picker, Download CSV / JSON) — Labor → Reports (/labor/reports)
- Reconcile the period before exporting — Labor → Hours Reconciliation (/labor/reconciliation)
- Time entry review queue (clear pending hours) — WMS → Labor Review (/wms/labor-review)