Case Study
Discover how Distinctive Options significantly increased business efficiency through the transformation of HR and payroll processes with Ready Pay.
| 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 |
For over 35 years, Distinctive Options has been committed to helping people with disabilities achieve their goals and fulfil their individual potential. A charitable not-for-profit organisation with five offices across Northwest Victoria, it offers innovative group and one-to-one experiences, learning opportunities and support, as well as helping people make the most of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
The challenge
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 manual 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.”
“I would describe Ready Pay’s support as excellent. We wanted to implement a new system based on what we needed, not what was offered out of the box. 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.”
Learn moreThe solution
Distinctive Options was in search of a SaaS, cloud-based service with integrated HR and payroll capabilities. Front-of-mind was a desire to eliminate existing inefficiencies and also limit upfront capital expenditure on the IT project by using a SaaS solution with a fee-for-service model per active user payment model.
After a ‘glowing’ peer recommendation of Ready Pay by HR3, Distinctive Options investigated 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.
With that in mind, we implemented the below Ready Pay modules – Payroll, Human Resources, Kiosk, Onboarding, WHS and Automated Workflow just to name a few.
The result
Having implemented the solution for over three years now, Ready Pay has been ‘life-changing’ for Distinctive Options that delivered significant benefits including:
- A highly efficient system that eliminated the need for paper timesheets and helped reduce the financial risk with accurate payroll.
- Employee self-service via Kiosk is brilliant for easy access to timesheets, payslips, and leave requests around the clock.
- Ready Pay has enhanced profitability with accurate payments and reduced wage bills, while also being commended for a holistic approach to the implementation phase.
Distinctive Options recommend other businesses to consider Ready Pay regardless of employee numbers as 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.”
“Ready Pay by 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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