Off-cycle payroll approvals

Name: Off-cycle payroll approvals
Creator: TestPattern Community
License: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

Detects off-cycle and ad hoc payroll payment requests and approvals for an identified employee: off-cycle pay requests, manual/special pay runs, final pay and termination pay calculations, with payment amounts or payment date.

Type: regex
Engine: boost_regex
Confidence: medium
Confidence justification: Medium: the primary phrases also appear in policies, guidance, blank forms and news, so enforce tiers require a populated field with a non-placeholder value and 85 adds a record-specific populated detail plus independent corroboration. Person and record values are customer-defined, so the field regexes use labelled loose values with a placeholder guard. 85/75 are heuristic evidence tiers, not measured accuracy.
Detection quality: Topic false positive
Jurisdictions: au, global
Regulations: Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), Fair Work Regulations 2009 (Cth), Industrial Relations Act 2016 (Qld), Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), Information Privacy Act 2009 (Qld)
Frameworks: ISO 27001, ISO 27701
Data categories: financial, employment, pii
Scope: wide
Risk rating: 4
Platform compatibility: Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Degraded, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

(?i)\b(?:off[\s-]cycle\s+(?:pay(?:ments?|roll)?|pay\s+runs?)(?:\s+(?:requests?|approvals?|forms?))?|ad[\s-]hoc\s+(?:payments?|pay\s+runs?)\s+(?:requests?|approvals?)|manual\s+(?:payments?|cheques?|pay\s+runs?)\s+(?:requests?|approvals?)|special\s+pay\s+runs?|supplementary\s+(?:payments?|pay\s+runs?)|urgent\s+payment\s+requests?|final\s+pay\s+(?:calculations?|requests?|approvals?)|termination\s+pay(?:ments?)?\s+(?:calculations?|approvals?|requests?))\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

approved, approver, authorised, delegate, reason, termination, urgent, final pay

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

Off-cycle payment request Employee name: Avery Teston Employee ID: 4471820 Reason: missed overtime from pay period ending 12/09/2026 Gross amount: $642.30 Payment date: 18/09/2026 Approved by delegate: Jordan Staffson — 85: off-cycle payment request with employee, gross amount, payment date and delegate approval
Final pay calculation Staff member: Morgan Teston Unused annual leave paid out: $4,812.66 Payment in lieu of notice: $3,200.00 Termination date 30/09/2026; authorised by the HR manager. — 85: final pay calculation with staff member, leave payout and PILN, authorised
Special pay run requested for staff member: Casey Teston - details in the attached email. — 75: special pay run request naming the staff member, no amounts
off-cycle payment request — 65: bare phrase only - discovery tier

Should not match

An employee's final pay calculation includes outstanding wages and unused annual leave. This fact sheet explains when final pay must be paid. — FWO-style guidance - must stay at or below 65
Off-cycle payment request Employee name: __________ Gross amount: $______ Payment date: __/__/____ — Blank request form - must stay at or below 65
Run a special pay run in minutes with our payroll software. Book a demo. — Vendor marketing - must stay at or below 65
unrelated generic text without domain phrases — No relevant topic phrases present

Known false positives

Policies, procedures, regulator guidance, fact sheets and training material that name the record type. Mitigation: Enforce tiers require populated fields; guidance has labels without values, and policy/guidance/training/media-release framing is excluded by the NOT-group.
Blank forms, templates and system configuration screens. Mitigation: Blank lines, bracket placeholders, XXX and n/a/tbc values are rejected by the placeholder guard; template/fixture words are excluded by template-exclusion.
News, statistics and vendor marketing. Mitigation: No populated person or record fields, so these stay at 65 discovery.
Payroll calendars that schedule supplementary pay runs without employee data. Mitigation: No populated person field, so these stay at 65.