Payroll day scrambles because the inputs live in four places and nobody reconciles them until the deadline. This recipe resolves the pay period, pulls time-off and holidays from the calendar, and reconciles the hours and contractor invoices in your spreadsheet against the roster. Anomaly checks flag unusual hours, missing timesheets, and new vendors before they become payroll mistakes, and per-person totals plus the period cost roll into a payroll journal summary. The output is a readiness checklist with a sign-off box for every open item — nothing runs payroll, but nothing about it is a surprise either. Chase emails for missing timesheets are drafted and staged for approval, never sent unreviewed. Idempotent per pay-period: reruns update the checklist in place, never duplicate a flag or chase a timesheet twice.