Spotlight on $avings

A Little Automation Saves More Than $20,000 Annually at Lincoln Intermediate Unit #12 (New Oxford, PA)

At LIU12, an intermediary unit / school district with more than 1500 employees, payroll staff used to spend far too much time pushing paper and calculating payroll by hand. With BudgetSense, they have been able to automate these tasks, and save serious time and money.

This is their story.

Direct Deposit Receipts

For every payroll, it was the same thing. PR staff spent hours - if not days - printing, folding, and mailing direct deposit receipts. It became painfully obvious that something had to change, so LIU12 decided to send all direct deposit receipts via email, straight from BudgetSense.

To set this plan in motion, LIU12 defined and completed a short To-Do list:

• They requested a valid email address from all employees. Employees reacted well to this change in policy, although there were a few objections, mostly due to personal home computer security concerns.
  
  
• They entered all email addresses into employee master records. True, this took some time, but it's a one-time task, with minor maintenance effort going forward.
  
  
• With assistance from support and IT staff at UniFund, they configured BudgetSense to interface with their email server.

The result? Says Tom Mesler, Director of Business Services at LIU12,

"We are pleased with how simple this implementation was, and thrilled with the savings of more than $14,000 in forms, postage and labor expenses."


Retroactive Pay Processing

This distribution / pay adjustment was another task that just wasted too much valuable time. Due to frequent employee position changes between DACs, there were always retroactive pays to be processed. It was a tedious manual procedure; the payroll team would have to:

• calculate employee pay, and benefits for each pay period to be included in the retroactive pay
  
  
• create and post a painstaking 16-line manual entry for salary and benefits, as well as details for time frames and percentages.

What should have been simple month-end and year-end position changes required two people to spend several days each period just handling these tasks manually. Now, retroactive pays can be calculated and processed in a matter of minutes each, with the added assurance that each affected employee will be paid correctly the first time.

Says Ted Carr, LIU12 Accountant,

"Taking advantage of the retro pay automation feature in BudgetSense has eliminated this "bear" of a manual task, and gave us a pain-free method that literally saves us days of time (almost $2,000 in labor costs) each month."

In any educational or government organization, payroll is a mission critical and complex process. With labor and benefits accounting for 75% of annual budget expenditures or more, powerful software is a must.

BudgetSense Payroll is designed to do more than just calculate and print employee paychecks and W-2 forms. With BudgetSense, you can automate the entire Payroll / HR lifecycle. Take some time to implement these processes; you'll see potentially thousands of hours and dollars in savings.

We congratulate Lincoln IU #12 for doing just that.

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.