If only clients could interrogate their payroll data directly instead of waiting for static reports.
The PDF prison of payroll approvals
It’s Thursday afternoon. Your client has just received their monthly payroll approval pack — a 47-page PDF containing employee costs, statutory calculations, and journal entries for their 280-person workforce.
They’ve got until end-of-day Friday to review and approve.
The Finance Director opens the document, scrolls to page 23, and asks herself: “Why has the pension contribution increased by £2,400 this month?”
To find the answer, she needs to:
- Cross-reference three different sections of the PDF
- Open last month’s PDF in another window
- Pull up her own spreadsheet to manually calculate the variance
- Email the payroll bureau with six follow-up questions
- Wait for responses
- Start the review process again
By the time she’s confident enough to approve, it’s Monday. The payroll deadline has been missed. Again.
Sound familiar?
The hidden cost of static reports
For payroll bureaus, the PDF approval process feels professional and polished. The reports look good. Everything’s laid out clearly. But beneath that professional veneer lies a deeply inefficient reality:
Static PDFs slow reviews and hide details.
When payroll data is locked in a document format, clients can’t drill down into variances, filter by department, or sort by anomalies.
They’re forced to read sequentially, hunting for needles in haystacks.
Large payrolls are painful to check.
The bigger the workforce, the more unwieldy the PDF. A 500-employee payroll can generate 100+ pages. Reviewing that level of detail in a static format isn’t just time-consuming — it’s cognitively overwhelming and mportant details get missed.
Clients ask the same questions every month.
“Why did this change?” “What’s driving this variance?” “Can you break this down by department?” Your bureau knows the data exists, but it’s buried in your payroll system. Each question requires manual extraction, calculation, and another email thread.
Approval becomes a bottleneck, not a checkpoint
When reviews take days instead of hours, payroll processing schedules compress. Your bureau ends up running closer to deadlines, with less buffer for complications. One delayed approval can cascade across multiple clients.
Audit trails are fragmented.
When approval happens via email (“PDF looks good, please proceed”), there’s no structured record of what the client reviewed, what questions they asked, or what specific concerns were addressed before sign-off. Come audit time, you’re reconstructing conversations from email threads.
The irony of this situation is that your bureau holds all this data in structured, queryable form. They’re just presenting it in the least useful format possible.
What if approval was about understanding, not endurance?
Imagine instead that your client receives their payroll data not as a static document, but as an interactive view they can explore.
They open Luna and immediately see their payroll summary — headline figures, month-on-month variances, and any notable changes flagged automatically.
That £2,400 pension increase? They click the variance indicator. Luna instantly shows them:
- Three new employees enrolled this month
- Two employees who received pay increases
- One employee who moved from part-time to full-time
Within seconds, not hours, they understand the change. No email. No wait. No manual cross-referencing.
If they want to review overtime costs they can easily filter the view, sort by amount and even export the specific detail they need. The data responds to their questions in real-time.
When they’re confident everything’s correct, they approve — right there in the platform. The timestamp, the data state, and their approval are captured as a structured audit record.
Total time elapsed: 12 minutes instead of 2 days.
This is data-driven approval.
How Luna transforms the approval process
Luna moves payroll approval from file-based sign-off to data-driven insight.
Interactive data presentation
Upload your raw payroll data, and Luna presents it through live, configurable views. Clients see the same information you’d put in a PDF — but now they can filter, sort, search, and drill down. Departments, cost centres, pay elements, variances — all instantly queryable.
Focus on what changed
Luna automatically highlights variances and anomalies. New starters, leavers, pay increases, and hours changes — the system surfaces what matters so clients can review efficiently. They’re not reading hundreds of unchanged lines; they’re focusing on the 15 items that require attention.
Contextual approval
Clients approve while looking at the data, not separately via email. They can add notes, flag items for discussion, or request changes, all within context. No more “see my questions in email” disconnects.
Structured audit trail
Every approval is captured with full context. What data was presented, what the client reviewed, what questions were asked, and what was approved. This isn’t reconstructed from emails, it’s structured, timestamped, and complete.
Client self-service
Between approval cycles, clients can log in and check their data at any time. “How many employees did we have in Q2?” “What was our total employer NI last month?” They get answers instantly without emailing your bureau which means your team gets fewer interruptions.
The business impact
This shift delivers measurable value across your operation:
Faster approvals
When clients can answer their own questions by exploring the data, review time drops dramatically. What took two days now takes hours. You compress approval windows and create a buffer in your processing schedule.
More accurate approvals
Interactive data means clients actually engage with the detail. They spot errors you might miss. They catch changes they forgot to tell you about. Approval quality improves because understanding improves.
Fewer email threads.
Questions that previously required bureau intervention -“Can you break down the overtime by department?” – are answered directly by the data. Your client services team spends less time extracting information and more time adding value.
Clear audit trail.
When regulators, auditors, or acquirers ask questions, you don’t point to email folders. You demonstrate a structured approval process with complete audit capture.
Better client experience.
Clients get transparency, control, and speed. They’re not waiting for your bureau to answer simple questions. They’re empowered to understand their own payroll data. That’s the kind of service that wins renewals and generates referrals.
Competitive differentiation.
Most bureaus are still stuck in PDF-world. Offering interactive, data-driven approval sets you apart. It’s a tangible service improvement you can demonstrate in new business pitches.
From files to insight
The payroll industry has spent decades refining how we generate reports. We’ve perfected the formatting, the layout, the presentation. But we’ve been optimising the wrong thing.
Clients don’t need prettier PDFs. They need to understand their data — quickly, confidently, and independently.
Data-driven approval isn’t about replacing your reports. It’s about replacing the friction that surrounds them. It’s about moving from “read and trust” to “explore and verify”.
When clients can interrogate their payroll data directly, approval stops being a bottleneck and becomes what it should be: a quick, confident checkpoint before processing.
That’s operational efficiency. That’s control. That’s Luna.
From files to insight — the new way to approve
Ready to see how interactive approval transforms your client experience and operational efficiency? Get in touch so we can show you how Luna turns static payroll reports into live, explorable data.