Community group reduces HR and payroll burden

Community group clocks benefits

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Published on the 26/11/2013 | Written by MYOB

AT A GLANCE

Community AXIS Enterprises

INDUSTRY

Not-for-profit

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

Reduce payroll administration.
Improve timesheet compliance.

SOLUTION

EXO Employer Services with time clocks, implemented by BusinessHub.

THE BENEFITS

Pay processing reduced from two days to one hour.
Staff happy with timesheet compliance.
Scalability across new office openings.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

MYOB//
E: biggerbusiness@myob.com
NZ: 0800 696 239
AU: 1300 555 110
https://www.myob.com/

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Self-service and simple timekeeping reduce the HR and payroll burden for busy disability services organisation…

Community AXIS Enterprises Inc is a government funded, not-for-profit, specialist employment service, which has provided employment opportunities for people with barriers to employment across Victoria’s Grampians region for over 20 years.

The service is broken into two areas: AXIS Employment, which provides employment services to people with disability, and AXIS Worx, an Australian disability enterprise, which provides supported employment for 43 people with disability.

In 2012, the organisation secured five new contracts to expand its disability employment service across Victoria and South Australia. Although exciting, this has added a layer of admin to an already busy back office. With double the staff, making sure HR and payroll functions are running smoothly has never been so critical.

Struggling with paper
Community AXIS uses MYOB Premier for accounting. Until recently, it was using it for payroll too, but in recent months a few issues started to creep in. Amanda Wirth, finance manager, explains.

“As an accounting system, Premier was working just fine for us – it still is in fact. But at one of our sites, we were struggling to get people to fill out paper timesheets correctly. That’s when we started to think there might be a better way of doing things.” As it happens, Community AXIS had just received an email update from MYOB introducing EXO Employer Services.

“It was the time clocks that got our attention,” says Wirth.

“Then we examined EXO a bit more closely and realised there was more to it than just that. There were other modules like EXO Payroll, EXO Employee Information, MyStaffInfo and EXO Time & Attendance, and we felt these could be really useful too.”

Taking the time to get it right
So Community AXIS turned to Melbournebased HR and payroll specialists BusinessHub.

According to the finance manager, the entire implementation took the best part of six months, which she acknowledges is probably longer than most businesses take.

“But,” she adds, “we had a number of things to consider.”

Chief amongst these were the two concurrent databases that the organisation was running (one for supported employees, the other for everyone else). Community AXIS wanted to run specific EXO modules in each database, and that prevented it from being a straightforward implementation.

There when you need them
By early 2013, however, all Employer Services modules had been fully installed, with the help and expertise of BusinessHub.

“It’s fair to say [BusinessHub] were pretty helpful from the day dot,” says Wirth, “and have continued to be. “I must have spent hours on the phone with them at year end, at one point till about 8:30 at night, and they never objected. I think that goes above and beyond the level of service you could expect from a lot of other service-based businesses.”

“I can remember when processing fortnightly pay used to be a two day process. Now it can be done in an hour.”

Amanda Wirth, finance manager, Community AXIS Enterprises

Staff love it
Given that the time clocks were what drew Community AXIS to EXO in the first place, Wirth is pleased that these have been such a success, especially amongst the supported employees.

“We’ve got four clocks set up,” she says, “and it couldn’t be easier to capture time. Employees simply swipe their cards once at the start of the day and again as they leave. The information is available in EXO straight away, without any manual entry.” It’s not a chore either. Staff have really taken to it, Wirth adds.

“It was the last module we installed,” says the finance manager, “so they knew it was coming a long way off. As soon as it went live, they were very eager to start using it.”

No organisation too big
The expansion of the organisation has been a real test for EXO. Over a very short space of time, additional offices in Ballarat, Bendigo, Mildura, Swan Hill and Mount Gambier doubled the workforce. A lesser system would have struggled to accommodate such rapid growth, but EXO’s multi-site capability means that the organisation can still function coherently even across multiple locations. “Being able to do things electronically – rather than having to fill out paper forms – is a real bonus when you’ve got multiple sites,” says Wirth.

Slashing admin time
When asked to sum up the biggest benefit of EXO Employer Services, Wirth doesn’t hesitate. “It saves so much time,” she says.

“I can remember when processing fortnightly pay used to be a two day process. Now it can be done in an hour.

“In the future, I can see the HR side of EXO being very useful too. There are a lot of time saving features in there like automated electronic filing that we haven’t really delved into yet.

“At some stage, we may consider going over to EXO Business for accounting,” she adds, “but for the moment, we’re very happy with our set up. The Employer Services modules have made a big difference.”