Case Study
Disability Services
| Name: | Distinctive Options |
| Sector: | Disability Services, NDIS |
| Employees: | 200+ |
| Type: | Charitable not-for-profit |
| Region: | Northwest Victoria |
| Products: | Disability support services |
| Website: | www.distinctiveoptions.com.au |
Distinctive Options has eliminated workforce overpayments and significantly increased business efficiencies through the transformation HR and payroll processes with Ready Pay.
“I would describe Ready Pay’s support as excellent. We wanted to implement any new system based on what we needed, not what was offered out of the box. We we reassigned a senior consultant who knew the product well and was able to use Ready Pay to meet our unique needs. The excellence of the Ready Pay staff assisting with the installation, set up and ongoing support is next to none.”
The challenge
Distinctive Options aims to be ‘the best’ it can be in supporting people with a disability to fulfil their individual potential. A charitable not-for-profit organisation with five offices across Northwest Victoria, it offers innovative group and one-toone experiences, learning opportunities and support, as well as helping people make the most of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
Distinctive Options had a highly manual, paper-based HR and payroll operation that used a legacy integrated payroll and accounts system. With a reliance on manual data entry (often under time pressure after the delivery of paper timesheets just before a pay run) as well as a limited number of system users, it was described as ‘very inefficient’, ‘prone to error’ and ‘limiting’ for data extraction. Distinctive Options’ 200-strong part-time and casual workforce accentuated the problem. With a significant reliance on paper timesheets for recording hours worked, there was room for anomalies in payment amounts and a limited ability to coordinate and risk-manage the payroll function.
“We had a heavily manualised and inefficient process. People would bring in their timesheet on a Wednesday when you were about to pay people. Imagine trying to manually input 200 pay slips? Our system was also counter-productive because our accounts team needed to exit the system to allow the payroll to be processed and that was holding everyone back from doing their job.”
The solution
Ready Pay Modules
Payroll
Kiosk
HR
Onboarding
WHS
Automated Workflow
“Distinctive Options went in search of a SaaS, cloud-based service with integrated HR and payroll capabilities. Front-of-mind was a desire to eliminate existing inefficiencies through the digitisation of existing manual and paper based processes. Distinctive Options also preferred to limit upfront capital expenditure on the IT project by using a SaaS solution with a fee-for-service model per active user payment model, and required significant ‘latitude’ to tailor a system to the unique requirements of the business and industry before and during the implementation process.
After a ‘glowing’ peer recommendation of Ready Pay by HR3, Distinctive Options went on to investigate and select Ready Pay for a number of reasons, including its ‘agility, accessibility, scalability, sophisticated reporting and ability to integrate with our other non-cloud based solutions via opensource or API.”
Ready Pay has been ‘life-changing’ for Distinctive Options. Described as a ‘highly efficient’ system that makes information ‘highly visible’, it was ‘definitely a good investment’ that delivered significant benefits including that ‘financial risk was significantly reduced with accurate payroll’.
Employee self-service through Kiosk is described as ‘brilliant’ in putting timesheets, payslips and leave requests ‘within people’s reach’ through 24/7 access, while Ready Pay has ‘improved profitability’ through payment accuracies and significant wage bill reductions. Ready Pay was also ‘commended for a holistic approach to selling and transitioning clients to the implementation phase’.
Distinctive Options recommended other businesses consider Ready Pay ‘regardless of employee numbers’, saying ‘the progressive add-on of modules is doable without IT consultancy intervention’ and ‘automatic updates on the cloud-based software are seamless, so we don’t have to do anything at all’.
“We are now two decades ahead of where we were. We have reduced our reliance on paper and file storage and saved time per job as a percentage of the number of hours. We’re also no longer bound by office limitations as payroll can be done from anywhere. The biggest savings have come in the accuracy of payroll costs, where we eliminated some instances of salary overpayments.”
“HR3 is life-changing for organisations who have been heavily reliant on the manual processing of HR and payroll data. It has been a pleasant and rewarding experience to have found a software provider that cares and understands your business and is able to help you achieve best practice delivery of HR and payroll solutions in a changing world.”
Alma Tuazon
Chief Financial Officer
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