My Original USIC Story
I joined USIC’s payroll department after stepping away from corporate life to care for my then-minor child during a critical medical period. My first week was coincided with the now infamous “Friday the 13th” payroll. If you know your USIC payroll history, you’ll remember that up was down and down was up. Employees were either significantly overpaid, underpaid, or, in some cases, not paid at all.
Stepping in as a temporary employee, I quickly identified opportunities to apply reporting and data analysis to reestablish payroll integrity. Those tools became the foundation for both reconciling pay and rebuilding trust, turning what was meant to be a two-week assignment into a long-term and rewarding career in USIC’s payroll department. Although this role shifted me away from my original HRIS focus, it perfectly fit my family’s needs at the time and allowed me to continue leveraging my HRIS expertise behind the scenes.
HRIS has always been the foundation of my career. In every position I’ve held, I’ve sought opportunities to apply my database knowledge, advanced report writing, and process design skills to enhance system efficiency and accuracy. Whether configuring payroll dependencies or auditing system logic, I’ve always aimed to turn complex compliance rules into seamless, automated accuracy. This continues to be my guiding approach: Analyze. Automate. Deliver Accuracy.
Case Study: Building Historical Payroll Data for Workday Conversion (USIC)
Following the data reconciliation work that stabilized payroll after the “Friday the 13th” incident, I was later entrusted with one of USIC’s most critical system projects: preparing for the company’s mid-year 2013 migration from ADP to Workday. One of the most complex challenges in this effort was ensuring that every employee’s year-to-date payroll history imported accurately. The project required a complete recreation of payroll records for nearly 20,000 employees, including every accumulator for earnings, taxes, deductions, and benefits.
As a Sr. Payroll Analyst, I was uniquely equipped for this work because of my HRIS and SQL background. Leveraging SQL extracts from ADP’s raw pay data, I engineered a process to aggregate each employee’s year-to-date values, including gross pay, taxable wages, all federal and state withholdings, Social Security, unemployment, 401(k), and employer contributions, and then convert them into Workday’s required import structure.
Because ADP did not allow reporting on certain employer-paid fields, such as state unemployment insurance, I built cross-reference tables in Microsoft Access to calculate employer contributions and state-specific limits automatically. The database I designed generated accurate Workday import files, and every total matched ADP’s quarterly static reports to the penny.
The consultant supporting the implementation later confirmed that most companies pay external teams an additional $18,000 to produce this level of conversion data. My internally built solution achieved that same accuracy at no cost, enabling a smooth and successful Workday go-live. This accuracy was vital in restoring confidence in payroll following the issues that first brought me to USIC and demonstrated that deep systems knowledge and hands-on data expertise are the backbone of a successful conversion.
The success of this project became a defining milestone in my career, and reinforced the value of combining HRIS precision with payroll execution.
Interactive FLSA Overtime Calculator
This tool is a simple example of how I apply payroll logic and calculation design to ensure accuracy and compliance.
Weekly regular-rate method with nondiscretionary bonus included in the week it applies.
For multi-week bonuses, allocate the total across covered weeks before calculating each week’s regular rate.