Thursday evening, 8:10 PM. Marco just received his paycheque stub by email. He scrolls, goes back, compares it with last week's. Something's off. He was in Chibougamau Monday and Tuesday. The remote-site premium isn't there. He hesitates a minute, then takes a photo of the stub and texts the foreman.

The next day, your office manager gets the follow-up. She has to dig out the timesheet. Track down which truck left, who was driving, how many kilometres to the camp. Correct it. Issue an adjustment on the next pay. And if it happened to Marco, it probably happened to two other guys who didn't look at their stub as closely.

Premiums, in Quebec, are the weak point of almost every paper timesheet we've seen. Not because nobody wants to pay them. Because the process gives them too much room to fall through the cracks.

The premiums that get missed most often

You know them by heart. Here's the list anyway, to see which ones make you wince.

Travel. When the site is a certain distance from home or the meeting point. It's calculated in kilometres, varies by sector, and requires knowing where the guy went and where he came from. On a paper sheet, that information is rarely noted. It lives in the foreman's head.

Remote site, accommodation, board. Site far away, sleeping on location. Applies to nights, meals, sometimes weekends spent on site. Three different conditions depending on the day. Easy to underestimate when you're reconstructing the week from memory Friday evening.

Elevation. Above a certain height, an hourly premium kicks in. On a single-family home site, it goes unnoticed. On a ten-storey tower, it changes pay meaningfully — and missing it means paying less than what's owed.

Team leader. This one falls off frequently during crew shuffles. The guy who held the team leader role Monday reverted to journeyman Tuesday because someone else was taking over. Who remembers that the following Friday, five sites later?

Night work, Sunday work, elevated overtime. The rules are clear under Quebec's sectoral framework. Applying them requires knowing the exact hour, the exact day. That information needs to exist somewhere other than someone's memory.

Why they get missed

The root cause isn't bad faith. It's the chain.

A timesheet filled out at the end of a 10-hour day, or worse, at the end of the week, is a reconstruction. The employee checks a site, writes a total of hours, moves on. Premiums he applies if he thinks of them. If he doesn't, it's your office manager who has to deduce them from clues: the site name, the distance, who was there, whether there was an overnight.

That can hold at five employees and one site. At 18 employees and three concurrent sites, each with their own conditions, it becomes impossible to keep in your head. The rarest premiums — elevation on one site, team leader on a given week — go first.

And when an employee eventually notices, two things happen at once. You correct it. And trust takes a hit, because nobody likes feeling like they have to audit their own pay. (If you want to dig into what that really costs, in time and in trust, we've covered it in another post.)

What changes when premiums apply automatically

The idea is to take premiums out of human memory and put them in the rule.

When you configure a site in Heuro, you declare what applies by default: heavy residential or IC/I sector, elevation or not, distance from the meeting point, accommodation or not. When an employee clocks his hours on that site, the app already knows the remote-site premium applies that day. The team leader role is identified when it's assigned, not reconstructed three days later from a pile of papers.

Exceptions remain possible — not everything can be pre-configured. But the bulk of the calculation is done before your office manager even starts.

Missed premiums become rare. Adjustments too. And employees stop having to audit their own pay — which is probably the best sign that a system is working.

The 18-employee contractor in Montérégie we often reference has had zero post-submission corrections since adopting this approach. Not because his people are perfect. Because the system no longer asks everyone to remember everything.

Three things you can do starting Monday

If you're not ready to change everything, here's what makes a real difference even without a new tool:

Make a default conditions sheet for each active site. Distance, elevation, sector, accommodation. One site = one line. Share it with foremen and your office manager. Print it, tape it in the truck if needed.
Put the most common premiums at the top of your timesheet, not the bottom. A checkbox you see first gets checked more often than a line you fill in at the end.
Block ten minutes on Thursday to check the week's premiums, not on the 14th when pressure builds. Most of the corrections we see come through could have been caught then.

You'll already see a difference — and it'll show you where paper is failing you most.

If you want to see what it looks like when premiums apply automatically, sign up for early access — or take 20 minutes with us if you'd rather talk it through first.

Key takeaways

Premiums that fall through most often: travel, remote site, elevation, team leader, night/Sunday premiums
The cause isn't bad faith — it's a chain that makes premiums dependent on memory
Declaring site conditions once fixes most of the problem
The best sign the system is working: your crew no longer has to audit their own pay