For ops managers + payroll teams

For ops managers and payroll teams

If your Friday afternoon involves pinging four techs in Teams asking whether they have logged their time, this page is for you. Connect Zero for Timesheets takes the chase chain out of your day. The system reminds your staff. The dashboard tells you who is on track. Payroll runs on a known-good dataset.

The week as it is now

What your week looks like now

A normal pre-pay-run week, in five quick beats. If you recognise three of them, this product was built for you.

Wed PM You start the chase. Four DMs to four techs. Two reply. Two are on site until 7pm.
Thu The time report says two are behind. You message both. One promises to catch up tonight. The other goes quiet.
Fri AM No catch-up overnight. You ring. Customer site. You leave a voice mail.
Fri PM Bookkeeper is waiting for the CSV. Three people still behind. You log into Xero and patch by hand.
Mon Pay run is late. A tech messages: "where is my pay". The week starts on the back foot.

90 minutes to three hours of your week, every week. Plus the indirect cost, wrong pay runs, retro adjustments, the trust hit when a tech is short. Connect Zero exists because this loop is broken and the fix is straightforward.

The week as it can be

What your week looks like with Connect Zero for Timesheets

Wednesday afternoon, the dashboard already shows you who is behind. Your eye goes to a small amber pill next to Liam's name, he is 4 hours short. You do nothing. The system sends Liam an SMS at 4pm: "Hi Liam, you have 4 hours of time entries to log for this week. Please catch up by Friday close. Thanks." Liam logs the entries that evening. The dashboard goes green Thursday morning. Mia, who normally logs Friday morning, is also flagged on Wednesday, she logs by Thursday lunch because the SMS prompts her a day earlier than she would normally check. Friday close, you have zero people behind. The bookkeeper has a clean Xero dataset ready Monday.

The mechanism is simple. The system handles the chase. You handle the exceptions. When someone is genuinely behind for a reason (sick, off-site, mid-leave) the dashboard surfaces it and you have time to deal with it as a person-to-person conversation rather than a routine reminder. Your week shifts from chasing routine compliance to managing the genuine exceptions. The exception conversations are usually short and useful; the routine chase was usually long and resented.

The dashboard you live in

The dashboard you live in

The compliance dashboard is the screen you open on Wednesday afternoon to know whether everything is on track. Three views matter: the all-team aggregate (compliance percentage, count of staff behind, count of staff on track), the staff heatmap (a grid of staff x day, green for met expected, amber for partial, red for none), and the individual timeline (per staff member, when each entry was logged across the pay period). Most ops managers spend less than 5 minutes per day in the dashboard, most days, no action is needed.

When action is needed, the dashboard gives you the context to act. Click into a behind-staff record and you see their last 4 pay periods, their SMS reminder history, and any notes you have logged. The "send manual reminder" button is one click for an out-of-band nudge. The "mark as exception" toggle lets you skip a staff member for this pay period if they are on leave.

See the reporting screens in detail ›
Team compliance · Wed 22 May Last sync 11:54
90%
On track
2
Behind
23
/ 28 staff
JPJack Patterson71.3 / 76On track
LOLiam O'Brien47.2 / 76-20.8h
CBCharlotte Bennett72.8 / 76On track
MWMia Walker72.0 / 76On track
ETEthan Thompson68.5 / 76-7.5h
For your bookkeeper

What your bookkeeper or payroll administrator sees

The bookkeeper does not log into Connect Zero. They log into Xero. By Monday morning, the Xero payroll timesheets are populated for every active staff member with the hours that were approved in ConnectWise during the previous pay period. The bookkeeper reviews in Xero, runs the pay batch using Xero's payroll engine, and lodges PAYG and super through Xero's standard flow. From their perspective, the timesheet just appears. They do not need to retype anything from CSV. They do not need to query the ops manager about missing entries (the system handled that already). They run the pay on time, every time.

If the bookkeeper needs to investigate a specific timesheet line, where did this come from, when was it logged, they can click through to the audit log via a link in the Xero timesheet's note field. Connect Zero adds a back-reference note to each timesheet line for traceability.

The exec hand-up

Weekly summary email

Every Friday at close, a weekly summary email lands automatically in the inboxes you choose. Headline numbers up top: cycles run, timesheet lines posted to Xero, reminders fired. Underneath: the top of the period and the staff who need attention, with the exact status pulled from the same data the live dashboard reads from. The owner gets a one-screen view without logging in; you get the next conversation set up before Monday.

Recipients, frequency (weekly or monthly), and the level of detail are configurable per workspace. The same email engine drives the reminder templates, so the tone stays consistent across SMS, email reminders, and the exec digest.

Stop being the chase chain

Start the trial. The first week shows you whether the SMS reminders and the compliance dashboard would change your routine. Most ops managers know within 5 working days.

Start a free trial

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Connect Zero is an independent third-party application. 3CX is a registered trademark of 3CX Software DMCC. ConnectWise is a registered trademark of ConnectWise LLC. Xero is a registered trademark of Xero Limited. Connect Zero is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by these companies. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.