Spotlight on $avings

When "We have always done it this way" is no longer good enough.

- Jordan-Elbridge Central School District, Jordan, NY

Bill Hamilton, Jordan-Elbridge’s Business Manager, knew the district should change with the times.

The payroll-related workflows that had been in place for decades had become stale and ineffective at best, and quite possibly could become problematic. Times have changed; with the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers must carefully re-examine policies and procedures to make sure that employees are paid accurately, and in compliance with labor regulations.

The biggest problem to address was the common practice of treating hourly, non-exempt, or annualized staff employees as salaried employees. Bill's investigations found that in many industries, non-exempt employees might be paid incorrectly. Because these employees are often paid in advance (for time they haven't worked yet), overtime and leave time are easily mishandled.

A second procedural weak spot was found in how the district collected and processed time-keeping records. “The time cards we used were inefficient and incomplete,” states Bill. “We had to chase people to get their time cards into payroll, and quite often it was difficult to decipher what hours and which jobs were worked. As a result, we were incorrectly paying people and furthering our non-compliance problems."

"Jordan-Elbridge was running a high risk of someone becoming disgruntled with this mess and blowing the whistle on us to the Feds for being in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.”

It became obvious that Jordan-Elbridge had to resolve these problems, so UniFund was called in to assist.

With more research and consultation, it was mutually decided that the best solution available was to automate the time-keeping system with time clocks from Time Clock Plus, and to integrate time-keeping with BudgetSense Payroll.

Bill met with Jordan-Elbridge’s unions to explain the changes that would be required to gain compliance with new laws, and to ensure that employees would be compensated accurately. For example, the unions agreed to accept a new policy to pay all employees on a semi-monthly basis, for hours actually worked.

The next big hurdle was to pay annualized employees overtime, when it was actually worked. “Finding overtime monies in the budget proved not to be a major hurdle,” claimed Bill. “As it turned out, our managers were forced to manage their labor schedules and budgets more effectively. We did not wind up paying out a lot of overtime dollars because of our better labor management.”

It was a simple process to integrate the district's new timekeeping system with BudgetSense Payroll. At the start of each pay period, BudgetSense exports employee position data to the time clocks. Employees swipe their time card, then enter hours worked for each assignment into time clock stations through out the district. At the end of each pay period, the time clocks export time records back to BudgetSense for payroll processing.

“We save two days each pay period, since we no longer manually enter payroll into BudgetSense."

"We now spend our time more effectively on time keeping QA and compliance.  We are more accurate and productive now with our payroll workflow."

"I'm happy we made all these changes. Much appreciation goes to my Jordan Elbridge team, Time Clocks Plus, and UniFund,” Bill stated.

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.