TRN Group is a haulage and civil engineering contractor from Camden, NSW. Operating since 1966, the family owned business now employs about 350 staff with a fleet of over 200 items of machinery and 40 semi tippers.
The Opportunity
With over 350 employees, TRN was spending significant effort interpreting daily timesheets to calculate penalties, RDOs and allowances. Many employees also work on more than one job per day, with travel and site specific requirements adding to the complexity. The hours and allowances were then keyed into payroll at the end of the week adding to the pressure to complete for payments to staff, resulting in mistakes and further administration effort to correct.
TRN took the opportunity to review the process to see if there could be time savings and reduction of pay errors.
The Infoware Solution
We discussed with TRN an alternative approach – Infoware’s i4Paytime award interpreter. Employees, or their managers, simply enter the start and finish times against job costed tasks in i4Paytime web timesheets. Infoware’s award interpreter then automatically calculates pay hours and rates including penalties, RDO’s and allowances in real time allowing employees and managers to immediately see the expected pay breakdown.
Being web-based, there is the ability for timesheets to be entered directly from site via smartphone or tablet, as well as PC. Managers can access and review all their employees’ timesheets as well allowing any possible issues to be handled as they occur.
The number of days shown is configurable. Users with smaller screens may show just one day at a time whereas tablet or PC users may show the whole week.
Once completed and approved, the pay’s timesheets are automatically transferred to payroll to finalise processing and payment.
The Outcome
The bottleneck of interpreting timesheets and entering payroll data has been completely removed. Payroll admin staff are now freed to concentrate on processing the payments and other HR related tasks.
“The introduction of Infoware Services approval app and interface with OCR has streamlined both accounts payable and other areas of our business. Our volume of creditor invoices has increased by 70% since introduction of i4 Creditor Approvals. Previously our creditors clerk was struggling with processing invoices for 4000 invoices and was assisted by a casual a couple of days per week. The volume has now grown to almost 7000 invoices per month and is now being comfortably handled by the one person in 4 days per week. More importantly the culture has changed as these and all other documents scanned can be immediately retrieved away from the office.
Introducing OCR and Infoware’s i4 Creditor Approval process has been a major plus in our company’s administration and costings. The flow on benefits are substantial. For our annual financial audit, we now give our auditors a computer and they can drill down straight to a PDF image of any invoice they wish to sight – rather than going through filing cabinets and archive boxes. Similarly, engineers and project managers can view invoices straight from a link in a job cost report rather than going to a filing cabinet to view the details. Our auditors, clients and competitors are amazed at what we are able achieve with such a lean administration team.”
Infoware is Single Touch Payroll (STP) ready.