What to send from payroll before a headcount briefing

The most expensive week in a study is the week we wait for a second extract. The first file arrives with job titles in a comments column and no leave dates. The second arrives two board-days later.

Send one sheet if you can. A stable person identifier that does not change when someone moves unit. Unit as it should appear on a chart, plus the old code if you still have one. Start date. Leave date if they left. Contract type in a short list you can explain (open-ended, fixed, intern, civil-contract). A labour-cost or salary field at a grain you will defend — individual or band, not a blank because “finance has that.”

Names should already be gone. Patronymics sitting in a full-name column are still names. If you need a gender split later, keep a gender field; do not leave us to infer it from a first name, which fails on mixed-language files.

Fields that look helpful and often hurt: “status” with twelve values including “active-pending”; manager name as free text; a location field that mixes “Tbilisi”, “Head office”, and a street. We can work with those, but we will spend cleaning days on them, and the quote will show it.

If the company has more than one payroll, say so before the scoping call. Two extracts that both claim to be “the employees” are a different study than one spine file.