The Questions I Wish I'd Asked Sooner About Supplemental Pay

Supplemental pay is one of those areas where everyone is doing their best and things still go wrong. Coaches, tutors, department chairs, and Friday night football workers all agree to take on extra responsibilities because they care about students. When the process to pay them breaks down, it feels personal, even when it isn't.

I've written before about the operational chaos of paper-based timecards and the transformation we achieved at Huntington Beach City School District. However, a harder question came before any of that: how do you figure out what actually needs to change, and where do you even start?

Districts can get stuck here, so I want to share my experience and advice.

Nobody Wakes Up and Says "Our Process Is Broken"

At Huntington Beach, we had three payroll positions: a lead and two technicians. The lead was leaving within six months, and one of the technicians resigned. These staff members hold a lot of institutional knowledge and are very hard to replace.

Meanwhile, supplemental pay was consuming a massive share of our payroll team's time. Regular pay is straightforward and are paid in monthly installments. As you likely know, supplemental pay has many more approvals (or “bus stops” along the route, as I like to call them. Without visibility into the process, I didn’t know where, when, or if delays were happening until an employee called asking about their extra pay. I needed to step in and look at the bigger picture.

Everyone Was Doing Their Best. It Still Wasn't Working.

No one thanks payroll for successfully processing hundreds of time cards correctly. The conversation always centers on the one or two that were missed in a pay cycle. This dynamic puts the payroll team in a very difficult position, even when they're doing their best.

I couldn't blame payroll. I couldn't blame principals. I couldn't blame teachers. Everyone was working hard within a process that wasn't set up for them to succeed. As I used to say, "Payroll is at the end of the line, so they take the hit, but that's not really fair." Most of the time, the problem didn't start with payroll. It started much earlier.

So I went to Cabinet and said, "We are going to find a better way, and we're going to fix it."

Asking the Right Questions First

Before we could solve anything, we had to understand what we were actually dealing with. Supplemental pay complexity might not be obvious from the outside. You've got varying rates for different positions, different funding sources, principals approving at different times, and finance not seeing what's committed until the deadline hits.

Board approval at the beginning of the year doesn't mean the work was done. The principal still has to sign off every month or every quarter, confirming the work was completed. Something can be board-approved but never implemented, so you can't just pay it automatically.

And if the pay is coming from a restricted fund or categorical program, the routing changes entirely. It might need to go to the coordinator of special programs before it reaches payroll. None of this is documented clearly in most districts. It's institutional knowledge that lives in people's heads and, in our case, on a workflow chart posted on the wall.

What We Looked At (and What Didn't Work)

When it came time to decide what to do, we had four options: keep going and hope for the best, hire and train more people, ask IT to build something custom, or find a sustainable solution that could outlast any single person on the team.

Google Sheets and eSign tools helped with collection, but they didn't solve routing, budget validation, or duplicate detection. We were just digitizing the chaos.

Building something custom in the ERP was another option we explored. But in my experience, ERPs are designed to tell you what was paid last month. They can't tell you what was approved this week or is still in transit. And the typical financial platform isn't user-friendly. Every change requires a programmer.

What we really needed was a system of action, something that could manage approvals, routing, budget validation, and duplicate detection before anything hits payroll. Our ERP was great as a system of record, but it couldn't do that upstream work.

What Actually Changed

Once we implemented the right tools, processing time dropped dramatically and accuracy improved across consecutive pay cycles. Those numbers were great. But what I cared about most was how it changed the daily experience for people across the district.

The system became what I call "an agnostic third party that keeps everyone accountable instead of making it a personal matter." Nobody was the bad guy anymore. Reminders went out automatically. Staff stopped asking "Where's my stipend?" because they could track exactly where their form was in approvals.

And those results scaled. I used the same approach at Orange Unified with 42 schools and 26,000 students, and at Huntington Beach with 8 schools and 5,000 students. The solution could be tailored to each district's needs rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach.

I'm not the only one who's seen this play out. Raul Parungao, Executive Director of Finance at Kent School District, put it this way: "For the first time since I joined the district, my payroll team got a real summer break. It showed me what's possible when we give people the tools they deserve."

And Trieste Huey, Assistant Superintendent of Business Services, shared her experience: "When I joined the district, we were buried under 900+ forms, pay delays, and union grievances. With Informed K12, we went from constant chaos to zero grievances, and teachers finally get paid on time."

What I'd Tell a Colleague Who's Evaluating This

If you're a CBO or Director of Business Services wrestling with supplemental pay, here are the questions I'd encourage you to ask yourself:

Does your current solution integrate with your existing systems, or are you maintaining parallel processes? How easy is it for a principal or department chair to use without training? Do you need programmers or IT staff to make changes? And how much are you spending on overtime for your payroll team to manage a process that could be automated?

Gather the data. Look at the last three months of problems and trace them back. I'd bet most of them were preventable with the right controls in place.

You should be able to focus on student learning and test scores, not worrying about preventable payment errors. I'm a problem solver at heart, and it energizes me to help other districts solve their problems.

Want to see how your supplemental pay workflows compare to top-operating districts? Take the 3-minute Payroll & HR Workflow Diagnostic to identify where you can save time, reduce risk, and reclaim resources.

By Jenny Delgado, CASBO Certified CBO/Consultant, Retired Assistant Superintendent, Huntington Beach City School District