Yvonne Sheppard
Payroll Officer
- Victorian Cytology
- Country
- Australia
- State
- VIC
- Industry
- Health and Community Services
- Employees
- 130+
Key Benefits for Victorian Cytology
- Streamlines payroll processing
- Excellent reporting
- Functionality to enable “what if” labour cost analysis
Background
Founded in 1965, the Victorian Cytology Service is a government-funded pathology laboratory whose main function is the reposting of Papanicolaou (Pap) tests. Located in Carlton, Melbourne, Victoria, it is the largest single laboratory reporting Pap tests in Australia, examining 270,000 Pap smears every year as a free service to women in Victoria. VCS, together with Victorian Cervical Cytology Registry (which is located on the same site) employs 120 full-time and part-time staff.
Challenges and Goals
Prior to implementing PayGlobal, Victorian Cytology Service used a payroll system called NewPay/Peruse, which was hosted as a bureau service by Allegiance Systems. Allegiance, which was formerly Health Computing Services, has served the payroll needs of the Victorian Public Health Sector for many years. The bureau announced that from June 2001 the product would no longer be supported in Victoria and, as a result, Victorian Cytology Service began to investigate alternative payroll providers.
As a small to medium size public health organisation, Victorian Cytology Service was particularly interested in finding an economical solution that was also extremely reliable. The organisation also used the opportunity to look at how it could enhance its processes.
Victorian Cytology Service first became aware of PayGlobal through its existing payroll provider. The laboratory had been looking at other providers on and off for two years but had never found a solution that it was confident would meet all its needs. It was reluctant to rush into implementing a new system until it was convinced that it could cope with the complexity of Victorian Public Health Sector entitlements. Upon reviewing PayGlobal’s proposal in early 2001, it believed it had found what it had been looking for.
“We were very impressed with the flexibility of PayGlobal, its easy reporting and integration. It was important to us that departments, other than payroll, could benefit from the information we were collecting. We were also influenced by the fact that other Health Sector organisations were using PayGlobal and seemed very happy with its performance,” Payroll Officer Yvonne Sheppard says.
Process and Solution
Whilst Victorian Cytology Service was originally looking only for a payroll system, it decided that PayGlobal Time and Attendance would also be of great benefit by enabling the automation of timesheet processing and reporting. So both PayGlobal Payroll and Time and Attendance were implemented in-house from February to late April 2001.
Although Victorian Cytology Service had previously used a bureau service, with PayGlobal it opted for an in-house set-up to allow it to have more control over its employee data and reporting. Yvonne was also pleased that PayGlobal gave her peace of mind by allowing her to check the payroll before finalisation, something that was not possible with the historic system.
Recording employee attendance and translating the information into payroll was previously a labour intensive job. Using a time clock, employees’ daily start and finish times were recorded on timecards. Supervisors would check and verify the times and then submit the cards to payroll for award interpretation, totalling and coding followed by data entry, batching and transmission to the bureau. On the last Friday of the pay period, the finish time was estimated for employees working that day, so that the payroll could be completed before the weekend and reports received and checked on Monday prior to distribution of payslips.
With PayGlobal, employees clock in and out using a magnetic swipe card which then automatically imports the data into PayGlobal Time & Attendance. T&A compares the times imported with the employee’s profiled hours and a true start time and end time is created on each day for each day an employee has worked. Supervisors then need only check times for employees who have no profiled hours or those who were absent. This automation allows supervisors to monitor attendance progressively throughout the pay period and significantly improves the efficiency of checking employee attendance. Once employee attendance is checked, the PayGlobal Award Interpreter automatically processes the employee payments removing the need for the payroll manager to interpret timecards manually. The calculated transactions are then submitted to PayGlobal Payroll for final processing.
Business Results and Return
PayGlobal Payroll and Time and Attendance have brought a number of benefits to Victorian Cytology Service by reducing the amount of manual processing required to run each payroll and thus reducing the danger of incorrect payments due to ‘operator error’. It has also allowed the payroll manager greater control over the payroll process in general and greater choice and flexibility of reporting.
“We are happy with our choice of PayGlobal as our new payroll provider. We have a reliable, user-friendly system tailored to meet our present needs, with the flexibility to accommodate future change, and we have control over the payroll process and reports. Implementation and support personnel have been unfailingly helpful and accommodating,” Yvonne says.
“Implementing PayGlobal Payroll and Time and Attendance allowed us to automate most of the payroll process, specifically enhancing the accuracy of the payroll through the use of an Award Interpreter. We were also able to easily report on financial and employee attendance information,” she explains.
Get in touch
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- 1800 129 181
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- 0508 104 357
“That probably reflects the experience that PayGlobal already has in the health market in Victoria. We are also running weekly as well as fortnightly pays to cope with requirements of different awards. The system handles this with ease.”
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