The Challenge
As is typical in the healthcare sector, the nature of the business means employees’ hours are varied, overtime is common and payroll is tied directly to revenue. Catching every discrepancy and inefficiency, every week, is business critical. But Ultimate Care’s payroll & scheduling teams’ Excel sheets were highly complex and time consuming. It was difficult to find problems hiding in the data. And worse, Ultimate Care was not aware of any potential significant issues. Like many businesses, they relied on one key assumption: if they followed the common process correctly, they would find their blind spots.
The solution
Ultimate Care’s Senior Financial Controller Mark Jay had never seen an automated audit layer built specifically for payroll teams. “We didn’t think we needed it,” he says. “But it was a no-brainer to try it out. The Implementation was seamless, easy and unheard of - all you have to do is upload your pre-payroll set template Excel sheet. Anybody can do it in two minutes.” What he saw gave him a shock.
Ultimate Care’s overtime costs were 25% higher than they thought. Employees they assumed were working 50 hour weeks were in fact doing 80 hours. Various hidden scheduling issues were eating into margins.
“Before the Pre-Payroll Review we had no real way to find hidden errors. Our data has to pass between multiple departments and be cross referenced, and there was no guarantee we’d catch everything. Now, we can find mistakes that are costing us in real time.”
“The Pre-Payroll Review showed us our assumptions were wrong. Now our margins are way higher.”
Natoya Smellie, Operations Director
The results
- 3.9% to <3% overtime reduction
- $150K+ annual cost-savings
- 490% proven ROI
