Very Special Kids

Company overview

Very Special Kids (VSK) is a not-for-profit organisation based in Melbourne, Australia, that cares for children with life-threatening conditions by providing a hospice and professional support services free-of-charge to families. With more than 100 staff and 953 volunteers, they were looking for an all-in-one payroll solution that would manage complex award interpretation, rota management and timesheets.

Challenges

Australia is ranked in the top five most complicated payroll systems in the world with over 130 modern 'awards' (specific, often complex conditions by which employees are paid, depending on role and industry), and employment agreements.VSK were previously using a local payroll company but still had to do their own interpretations of pay conditions and calculate timesheets as a manual process. The system was so old that it didn’t support their requirements so they were paying for a service that wasn’t delivering. VSK were also using paper timesheets which staff often lost or didn’t hand in on time, meaning a lot of time wasted chasing documents. This also meant they had to manually input the data into the payroll system and calculate the costs themselves.

How we helped

All-in-one in the cloud

“We loved KeyPay from the start; it just answered all of our needs”, said Jenny Sullivan, VSK’s Finance Officer. Having everything online means that the timesheet approval process is much quicker for VSK, and the manual checking and calculations have now been eliminated. Having just one system for rota management, timesheets and payroll means no double handling of data. Expenses have also been streamlined now that they’re managed in the cloud, and Jenny has saved time emailing back and forth to provide documents such as payslip to staff: “I can now just refer them to the employee portal. It’s just easy”.

Confidence and accuracy

Jenny’s team previously had to do all of the timesheet calculations and award interpretation themselves, meaning risk of human error and a lot of time wasted double checking data. Now, the team use Clock Me In for their scheduled staff which automatically calculates shift costs. With automatic award interpretation, VSK have complete confidence that their staff are being paid correctly. “The ease and the confidence that we have in KeyPay is 100%”. With these manual calculations and processes eliminated, the time VSK spend on payroll has been reduced by 50%.

Results summary

• Time spent on payroll reduced by 50%
• Employee requests eliminated