Web-Based Timesheet Submission & Payroll Automation (WITS)
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The West Gulf Maritime Association is the membership organization of steamship owners, operators, and agents, along with stevedoring and terminal companies located across all Texas ports and the Port of Lake Charles, Louisiana.
WGMA negotiates and administers multi-employer collective bargaining agreements with the International Longshoremen's Association across West Gulf ports. On behalf of its members, the Association provides payroll and payroll support services, certification tracking, and grievance processing for stevedores operating under those agreements, and it coordinates longshore worker training to promote a safe, efficient working environment.
The Challenge
WGMA's timesheet collection and payroll process depended on a manual, Excel-based workflow that did not scale to the volume or complexity of a port-wide membership.
Member companies were required to complete large, complex spreadsheets and submit them to WGMA. Because validation happened only after submission, errors in worker identifiers, hours, job codes, and pay rates were not surfaced until WGMA staff reviewed each file by hand. Correcting those errors meant a back-and-forth cycle between WGMA and the member company, often days after the work had been performed.
The approach created several compounding problems:
- Late error detection. Mistakes were caught downstream during manual review rather than at the point of entry, making them slower and more expensive to fix.
- High manual effort. WGMA staff manually validated every spreadsheet and keyed data into the payroll process, creating a labor-intensive bottleneck.
- No structured approval. Spreadsheets offered no consistent, auditable way for companies to route timesheets through their own internal sign-off before submission.
- Data integrity risk. Free-form spreadsheets are easy to mis-edit, and there was no enforced link between submitted entries and authoritative worker records.
WGMA engaged RDA to replace this process with a secure, web-based system that would streamline the collection, validation, and approval of timesheets and accelerate payroll processing.
The Solution
RDA designed and built the WGMA Internet Timesheet System (WITS), a cloud-hosted web application that lets member companies submit timesheets over the internet and routes them through a configurable approval workflow before payroll processing.
A custom observable workflow engine at the core.
At the heart of WITS is a purpose-built, observable workflow engine that runs the system's calculations and validations at scale. Every timesheet submission and batch upload automatically triggers a chain of background processes aggregating data and running the calculations and validations that drive overtime and payroll. Because the engine is observable, each process reports its status as it runs: warnings and errors roll up to the user and to WGMA staff, individual steps can be monitored and managed, and any calculation or validation can be re-run on demand without re-submitting the underlying data. When results are finalized, the engine pushes data to downstream systems, including the GreatPlains payroll processing system. This architecture turns what was previously manual, error-prone spreadsheet handling into a transparent, automated, and auditable pipeline that scales with submission volume.
Validation at the point of entry.
Rather than validating after the fact, WITS checks timesheet data as companies enter it. Worker identity, hours, job classifications, and rate information are validated against authoritative records up front, so companies can find and fix errors early, before submission, instead of in a downstream correction cycle.
Company-configurable approval workflow.
WITS replaces ad-hoc spreadsheet sign-offs with a structured, multi-step approval workflow that each member company configures to match its own internal process. Submitted timesheets move through defined approval stages, giving companies a faster and more consistent path to process and approve their entries.
Authoritative worker data.
WITS validates submissions against worker data held in WGMA's data warehouse, ensuring entries are tied to real, current worker records rather than free-form spreadsheet input.
Ongoing partnership.
Since go-live, RDA has continued to support WGMA, maintaining the system and delivering enhancements as the Association's needs evolve.
Technical Architecture
WITS is built and deployed as a modern, containerized cloud application on Microsoft Azure:
- Frontend: A Next.js / React single-page application delivering the responsive timesheet entry, validation, and approval interfaces used by member companies.
- Backend: An ASP.NET / C# API layer implementing business rules, the configurable multi-step approval workflow, and the custom observable workflow engine that orchestrates calculations and validations.
- Observable workflow engine: A custom engine that runs aggregation, calculation, and validation processes triggered by timesheet and batch submissions. Processes execute in the background at scale, surface observable status with rolled-up warnings and errors, support targeted re-runs, and publish finalized results to downstream systems.
- Database: Microsoft SQL Server (Azure SQL) as the transactional store for timesheets, approval state, and configuration.
- Hosting: The frontend and backend run as containers on Azure App Services, providing managed, scalable hosting with straightforward deployment.
- Secure data integration: An Azure VPN connection links the application to WGMA's data warehouse, enabling secure validation of submissions against authoritative worker data over a private network path.
- Downstream payroll integration: Finalized calculations are pushed from the workflow engine to the GreatPlains payroll processing system, eliminating manual re-keying between timesheet approval and payroll.
This architecture keeps the system scalable and maintainable, isolates the application tier from the worker-data source behind a secure private connection, and gives RDA a clean foundation for ongoing enhancements.
The Results
The new system transformed timesheet submission and payroll across the WGMA membership:
- 80% reduction in payroll processing time. By eliminating manual spreadsheet validation and data entry, WITS cut the time required for WGMA to process payroll by 80%.
- Faster approvals. The company-configurable, multi-step approval workflow lets member companies process and approve submitted timesheets more quickly and consistently than the previous spreadsheet-based sign-off.
- Fewer errors. Point-of-entry validation against authoritative worker data lets companies catch and correct mistakes early, improving timesheet accuracy and reducing downstream correction cycles.
Port-wide timesheet submission became simpler, faster, and far less prone to error, and the ongoing RDA partnership ensures the system continues to evolve with WGMA's needs.