Frequently Asked Questions

PAY RECONCILE - FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Demo portal: app.payreconcile.ca Last updated: July 2026 ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. WHAT IS PAY RECONCILE? ------------------------------------------------------------ Pay Reconcile is an independent payroll reconciliation engine for federal public service pay. You give it an employee's hours and earnings history; it recomputes what that employee should have been paid under the rules of their collective agreement, and shows the result beside what was actually reported on the T4. It is a check, not a pay system. It does not connect to Phoenix, Dayforce, or any departmental system, and it does not issue payments. ------------------------------------------------------------ 2. WHAT DOES IT COVER? ------------------------------------------------------------ All 27 federal collective agreements across all 10 bargaining agents are modelled. Each agreement has its own configuration built from the articles of that agreement - rates, premiums, overtime, shift and weekend premiums, acting pay, holiday and leave rules. Current agreement codes: AI AO CP CX EB EC EG EL FB FS IT LP NR PA PO RE RM RO SH SO SP SRC SRE SRW SV TR UT ------------------------------------------------------------ 3. WHAT DO I NEED TO RUN IT? ------------------------------------------------------------ Two things: a) An access token. Tokens carry a fixed number of runs. Paste yours into the portal when prompted. b) An hours file - a plain text file describing the employee's work history. FREE DEMO TOKEN Token: DEMO-1 Runs: 20 Use it now, no registration, no email address. When it runs out it will be topped up or replaced - check this page for the current one. If you want a token with real volume for a proper evaluation, write to [email protected] and say so. *** DO NOT UPLOAD REAL EMPLOYEE DATA TO THE DEMO TOKEN. *** No SINs, no names, no live pay records. This is a public demonstration site on a shared token, not an accredited system. Use the sample file, or synthetic data you invented. A real evaluation with real data is a separate conversation and a separate arrangement. A sample hours file (hours_FB_input.txt) is on the Resources page. Download it, open it in a text editor, change a few lines, save it, then upload your edited copy. That round trip is the fastest way to see how the engine responds to your own data. For editing hours files we recommend Notepad++ rather than Notepad. It is free and open source (GPL), it runs on Windows, and a portable build exists that needs no installation - useful on a locked-down desktop. See section 9 for why the choice of editor matters. On macOS or Linux, any programmer's editor will do: Kate, gedit, VSCodium, or vim are all fine. What matters is that the editor lets you see and control encoding, line endings, and whitespace. ------------------------------------------------------------ 4. HOW DO I RUN A RECONCILIATION? ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Go to app.payreconcile.ca 2. Enter your token. 3. Drag your hours file onto the page, or use the file selector. 4. Run. 5. The report opens in your browser. Download it only if you want a copy on your own machine. Runs are processed one at a time, so a busy moment may add a fraction of a second. Your quota is charged only when a run completes successfully - a rejected file costs you nothing. ------------------------------------------------------------ 5. HOW IS THE AGREEMENT CHOSEN? ------------------------------------------------------------ From the file name. The agreement code must appear in UPPERCASE in the name of the hours file - for example: hours_FB_input.txt -> Border Services (FB) hours_IT_input.txt -> Information Technology (IT) If the code cannot be matched, the run is refused with a message listing every agreement available. The engine will never quietly fall back to a default agreement and hand you a plausible-looking wrong answer. ------------------------------------------------------------ 6. WHAT DOES THE REPORT SHOW? ------------------------------------------------------------ A five-column summary, one row per year: Year The tax year. Computed Gross What Pay Reconcile calculates the employee earned, from the hours and the collective agreement. Pensionable The portion of that gross which is pensionable. Phoenix Pain Phoenix damages settlement amounts, where they apply. T4 Box 14 Employment income as actually reported on the T4. Difference Computed Gross less T4 Box 14. The Difference column is the point of the exercise. A non-zero figure is a flag for review, not a finding - it says these two numbers do not agree and someone should look. ------------------------------------------------------------ 7. WHAT IS THE "PHOENIX PAIN" COLUMN? ------------------------------------------------------------ The 2020 PSAC damages settlement paid affected employees $2,500. It is a settlement payment, not employment income, and it is not pensionable. The column shows an amount only for the PSAC bargaining units covered by that settlement (FB, PA, SV, EB, TR). For every other group it is correctly zero. ------------------------------------------------------------ 8. WHAT HAPPENS TO MY DATA? ------------------------------------------------------------ The report is generated and displayed in your browser. Nothing is written to your disk unless you press Download. A generated report is held briefly so that Download does not re-run the engine and charge your quota twice. RETENTION FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE Runs made on the free demo token may be kept - the hours file and the resulting report - so that we can see how the engine behaves on data we did not write ourselves. It is the most useful test material we have. Kept files are anonymous: the token is not stored, only a one-way hash of it, so repeat visits can be recognised as the same evaluator without recording who that is. Anything kept is deleted after 90 days. Runs on a named client token are NOT retained. That is a separate act with separate obligations, and it happens only under a written agreement, never by default. The hours file format includes an employee ID record with SIN redaction. Even so: do not put SINs, names, or anything else you would not put in an email into a file you upload here. The demo token is public and shared, and demo runs are retained - so treat this site as you would any unaccredited external service. Sample data and synthetic data only. ------------------------------------------------------------ 9. WHAT ABOUT FILE FORMATTING? ------------------------------------------------------------ Hours files are plain ASCII text. Windows editors are the usual source of trouble, so the portal repairs the common damage automatically on upload: it strips a UTF-8 byte-order mark, converts UTF-16 to UTF-8, converts CRLF or CR line endings to LF, and adds a missing final newline. What it cannot repair is content. Tabs silently converted to spaces, reordered fields, or invented record types will produce an error or a wrong answer. Edit the sample file rather than composing one from scratch on your first attempt. This is why the editor matters. Notepad gives you no view of what it is writing; Notepad++ shows you and lets you set it: Encoding menu -> Encode in UTF-8 (not "UTF-8-BOM") Edit > EOL Conversion -> Unix (LF) View > Show Symbol -> Show White Space and TAB That last one is the useful one. Tabs and spaces look identical on screen until you turn symbols on, and a tab quietly replaced by spaces is the single most common reason a hand-edited file misbehaves. ------------------------------------------------------------ 10. WHAT ARE THE KNOWN LIMITATIONS? ------------------------------------------------------------ - Substitute days for holidays that fall on a weekend must be added manually to the hours file; they are not generated automatically. - A contiguous-rest-day premium can fire for employees on a standard Monday-to-Friday schedule where it should not. - Pay Reconcile is a cleanup tool. It is built to find material differences after ten years of Phoenix, not to adjudicate every quirk of every article. These are documented deliberately. An engine that claims no limits is not one you should trust with a pay file. ------------------------------------------------------------ 11. WHAT IF I THINK A RESULT IS WRONG? ------------------------------------------------------------ Send the hours file and a short note on which day and which amount you believe is wrong. Change orders where daily pay results are incorrect are accepted, with a five-business-day maximum turnaround. Specific beats general: "the shift premium on 2019-11-14 should be X, under article Y" is actionable within the day. "The totals look off" is not. ------------------------------------------------------------ 12. IS THIS THE FULL PRODUCT? ------------------------------------------------------------ No. This is the free version, running a real engine against real agreement rules on a small volume of data. Funding scales it to every employee, every agreement, every year. ------------------------------------------------------------ 13. WHO BUILT IT? ------------------------------------------------------------ I-Technology Inc., Brantford, Ontario. Contact: [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------ 14. WHERE ELSE SHOULD I LOOK? ------------------------------------------------------------ The Resources page also holds the sample hours file and a demo video walking through a complete run from upload to report.