|
- Dartmouth Public Schools (Dartmouth, MA)
For Joanne Sylvia, Accounting Manager at Dartmouth Public Schools, labor negotiations with the teachers' union was about as enjoyable as a root canal. With more than 275 teachers on the payroll, it would take hours to calculate the budget impact of a single proposed salary increase.
As Joanne explains, "Our calculation was basically a manual system. We used a home-grown Filemaker-Pro database, but still had to manually bump everybody up a step, and key in the new salary projections, in order to calculate the cost. Each new proposed contract revision would take us four to six hours of manual tabulations."
Joanne smiles a lot more now, thanks to BudgetSense Employee Management.
The offline spreadsheets and databases are gone. With the powerful salary forecasting features in BudgetSense, she no longer dreads contract negotiations. Costing out a potential union contract only takes a fraction of the time it used to.
Manuel Cordeiro, Jr., the district's Business Administrator, is also thrilled. As he puts it, "We now can easily respond to the union's requests. In fact, it only takes us about 15 minutes to generate the impact of a new salary increase proposal. And we know the information is accurate, because it is integrated directly to payroll".
Overall, BudgetSense has saved the district business office from 30 to 40 labor hours per union contract, for a total annual savings of nearly $5000.00. As Manny says, "just like in any business, time is money. We are now able to refocus our efforts on more important financial issues."
Operationally, the payroll implementation portion of the project saves the district several hours each week, with the automation of payroll processing, and posting to the General Ledger. With a weekly payroll, this amounts to savings of more than 250 hours per year, or approximately $8000.00 in labor.
Dartmouth Public Schools sees the wisdom in adopting a completely integrated solution like BudgetSense rather than trying to maintain several silos of information. The School Business Administrator and the Finance Manager can attest that it took some effort to implement initially, but that the rewards are astonishing, and long-lasting.
In a future edition of uniNews, we will profile Dartmouth Public Schools' successful implementation of an electronic crosswalk to the town's separate accounting system.
 |
Have you noticed significant savings that you would like to share in the $avings Spotlight?
To share your story with the rest of the UniFund client community, contact us at $avings@unifundonline.com, so we can add your experiences to a future edition of uniNews. |
|
