Bourbon County clerk warns payroll conversion is moving too quickly, staff raise technical concerns

County Clerk (name not specified) told the Bourbon County Board of County Commissioners at a special meeting that a planned payroll and time-management conversion is proceeding too quickly and threatens county operations during the busy election period.

"This timeline is premature," the clerk said, adding that her office had only received access to view the new payroll and time-management systems for the first time that day but employees were expected to complete enrollment and begin clocking in on Sunday. She said the clerk's office must also prepare budgets, run open enrollment, and handle election duties from August through November and that the current schedule would require excessive overtime in her office.

The clerk said the change had been described as a cost-saving operational improvement but called it "a political move" and warned it "adds unnecessary administrative oversight, no integration with our current accounting system, increased risk of human error, and fails to meet the governance requirements we must adhere to as a county." She cited Kansas statutory duties, saying the clerk remains responsible for approving and recording county expenditures under KSA provisions presented at the meeting.

Jennifer (staff member), who said she has been helping set up employees, described specific technical and workflow problems with the new platform. "They said today that they can't accommodate the state overtime and blended rates that we see in our sheriff's department," she said. She also reported that employee codes were incorrect, supervisors could not approve time weekly as they do now, and administrators could not lock job or cost-center fields without locking them for all employees. "My main concern is employees can change the cost center and their job title," Jennifer said. "That would change their pay rate. That would change their code. That would change the fund in which they're paid."

Staff also said the new platform lacked an "auto lunch break" function currently available in the county's CIC system and appeared to require multiple systems for pay calculation and deductions instead of a single integrated workflow. Jennifer described the system as "rather clunky" and said manual calculations would increase the risk of human error and workload for the payroll clerk.

Commissioners acknowledged the concerns and discussed contacting the vendor. Commissioner Tran recommended asking the vendor, identified in discussion as Tim Emerson or an Emerson-associated company, to "backtrack" the rollout by two weeks and to provide a testing (sandbox) environment. One commissioner suggested pausing or delaying the launch to allow vendor representatives to review the issues and to bring the matter back at the regular Monday meeting so the vendor could attend.

In the meeting commissioners agreed the clerk and staff should email a document summarizing the issues to the commissioners and vendor liaison so the county could assemble a fuller record for the vendor and legal review. Commissioners also agreed to treat payroll as normal for the upcoming Monday payroll cycle in the interim, and to invite the vendor or their representative to the regular meeting.

No formal motion to delay or cancel the rollout was recorded in the transcript; the meeting record shows only a direction to compile and share documentation with the vendor and to place the issue on the next regular meeting agenda. The clerk said the county employs about 115 employees who will be affected by the change.

What happens next: commissioners asked that the clerk and Jennifer send the list of configuration and functionality problems to the vendor liaison and to the commissioners, and to invite the vendor to the next regular meeting for discussion and troubleshooting before any further rollout steps were taken.

Ending: The board did not vote on the payroll system change at the special meeting. Commissioners said they expected to continue communications with the vendor and to reconsider the launch after the vendor has had a chance to address the technical issues and provide a test environment.