✓ Month-end close & pay · 6 min read
Corrections after locking
A locked month is not merely hard to change — it cannot be changed at all. Even so, some errors only come to light afterwards: a forgotten sick note, an incorrectly transferred time, a premium that should never have applied. This article says what really works then — and what does not.
The lock is a one-way street
Zeitflex has no function that releases a locked payroll period again. Not for management, not for the owner, not in the month-end close and not anywhere else. There is no button for it and no procedure that would do it behind the scenes.
That is not a setting but the design: the close writes the month's figures down for good, and that is precisely its purpose. If it could be undone, a payroll that had already been paid out could change afterwards without anyone noticing.
What Zeitflex refuses from the close onwards — these are the application's own messages, word for word:
| If you try this | Zeitflex says |
|---|---|
| Correct a time in that month | “The month 08/2026 is closed and locked. Corrections are no longer possible.” |
| Add a time afterwards | “… Late entries are no longer possible there.” |
| Reject a time | “… A time from this month can no longer be rejected — the correction goes through the payroll office and takes effect in the following month.” |
| Withdraw a rejection | “… A rejection from this month can no longer be withdrawn — the correction goes through the payroll office and takes effect in the following month.” |
| Clock in or out retroactively (terminal, phone, offline queue) | “… This clock event has to be recorded at the office as a late entry.” |
| Close the month a second time | “This month has already been closed.” |
A sick note in a locked month can likewise neither be withdrawn nor revoked (Sick notes), and an import loads nothing more into a locked month.
The one route there is: a late entry in the current month
The locked month stays as it is. The correction goes through the current, still open month:
- Enter or correct the error in the current month — record missing hours afterwards, deduct hours booked in excess. This is done in the timesheet and is reserved for management (owner or manager).
- Establish the link in the reason. The reason is mandatory (at least five characters) and goes into the change log. Write into it what the entry refers to: “Late entry for March: Site North on 14 March not recorded.”
- Inform the payroll office so that it takes the difference into account. The application does not do this step for you.
This is exactly the way payroll offices go about it in other cases too. It has one decisive advantage: the payroll that has already been paid out remains traceable.
Does it make a difference whether payroll has already been run?
Not in Zeitflex. The route is the same either way, because the locked month stays shut either way. If payroll for that month has not yet been calculated, your payroll office may still be able to take the difference into account in the same run — that is their call, not the application's. So call early, not at the end of the next month.
An approved objection that could no longer be carried out
A section of its own, because this case arrives from the other direction: it is not management that spots the error but the person affected who reported it — and the application itself points here from there.
The situation: someone objected to a rejection (“I did work this time”), management agreed with them — and before the rejection had been withdrawn on the entry, the month was closed. From then on Zeitflex refuses the withdrawal, like any other change in a locked month.
Zeitflex does not leave the request sitting on “approved”. It closes it with the outcome “Month locked in the meantime”: the step is recorded in the log, and the person affected receives a message that states the reason and explicitly claims no settlement. The entry stays rejected and struck through in the timesheet.
What to do then is set out above — it is the same, and only, route as for any other error: record the hour in the current month, make the connection in the reason (“Follow-up to March: time on 14/03 was rejected wrongly”), and inform the payroll office.
The rejected entry in the locked month stays rejected. Withdrawing it is no longer possible — not for the owner either, and not even if payroll has not yet been run. The late entry in the current month does not replace it, it balances it out.
Tell the person that the late entry is on its way. All they see on the closed request is that the month was locked — not what happens next.
The two other named outcomes do not belong here. With “Time added in the meantime” the hour is already back, just via a new entry instead of via the withdrawal; the request is fulfilled, and nothing remains to be done except the question of whether the added time is correct. With “Time partly added in the meantime” the new entry covers only part of the span: the request then stays visibly open, and you decide about the remainder on the day itself. Both are described in Working without a network.
What is logged
So that it is clear that nothing happens unnoticed — and so that you know what you can point to in an audit:
- The close itself: who locked the month, and when.
- Every export with its time, format and file name — in the period's export log.
- Every late entry and every correction in the current month with before value, after value and the mandatory reason.
All of this is in the change log and visible in the tax adviser portal as “Changes since the last export”.
What is not logged is who took a lock back — there is nothing to log, because the operation does not exist.
Who may do what?
| Role | In an open month | In a locked month |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | correct, add entries, lock, export | read and export again only |
| Manager | correct, add entries, lock, export | read and export again only |
| Employees | request a correction | nothing — the request is refused |
Here the owner can do nothing more than a manager. That is the difference from almost every other place in Zeitflex, and it is deliberate: whoever could open a finalised payroll back up could also change it unnoticed.
Still stuck?
If several months are affected or contributions have already been reported, talk to your tax adviser first and then make the correction in Zeitflex. This order saves a second correction.
Last checked on . We check every article against the application — if something no longer matches, that is a bug and not a difference of opinion.
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