Fort Worth's city staff is ready to roll up their sleeves as they gear up to test out freshly bought payroll software designed to iron out the paycheck kinks for the men and women at the front line of public safety. They're dumping $365,000 into a trial run of the UKG system to see if it can cut the mustard when it comes to the intricate dance of calculating first responders' earnings without any hiccups, according to the City of Fort Worth.
There's hope in the air that this could be the magic bullet to end the longstanding snafu that's seen cops and firefighters either grinning at a windfall or steaming over short straws in their paychecks, city staff tossed this lifeline to the UKG experts back in September 2021, the team has been up to their elbows in codes and commands because the software has got to be tricked out with their own set of complex rules that figure out who gets what.
The City Council's poised to thumbs-up or thumbs-down this money shuffle on February 27 and with the stakes as high as they are—flawless paystubs and maybe a full stop to the old school slog-of-manual data entry—the clock's squarely ticking on this one. Yet despite the high hopes, the real work's just around the corner with all signs pointing to a May 2025 and September 2025 deadline finale for fire and police payrolls, respectively.
That's assuming the software doesn't go belly up during test runs, because let's face it, this isn't their first rodeo—previous fixes brought new bugs to the surface, keeping city staff and hired guns from UKG on their toes but if all pans out, Fort Worth's bravest and finest might soon be checking the right numbers on their payday.
