Jenny Davies
Payroll Officer
- Wooldridges
- Country
- Australia
- State
- WA, VIC, NT and SA
- Industry
- Retail
- Employees
- 360+
Key Benefits for Wooldridges
- It is easy to use and understand the system
- Full awards rates interpretation
- Integration between Time and Attendance and Payroll
- Flexibility to track data anomalies
- Complex reporting to aid decision-making
Background
Wooldridges is Australia’s leading educational supplier, specialising in back-to-school booklists and the supply of teaching, learning and other classroom and home educational resources.
Wooldridges operates multiple companies with 11 stores and warehouses across Western Australia, Victoria, Northern Territory and South Australia. Throughout the year, Wooldridges’ payroll consists of 159 employees, which increases to 360-430 employees during Christmas.
Challenges and Goals
To efficiently manage an influx of employees across its busier time periods, Wooldridges needed a flexible people management solution that could streamline payroll and time and attendance requirements. It wanted to eliminate paper-based timesheets, recall returning casual employees’ data, and provide an array of reporting capabilities at state, store and departmental levels.
Process and Solution
A comprehensive yet scalable solution, PayGlobal automates Wooldridges complex timesheet capturing and data entry capabilities, by offering an integrated people management solution with Payroll and Time and Attendance modules.
Utilising swipe cards and time clocks at all its staff locations, Wooldridges imports daily records of staff hours from the clocks into PayGlobal in order to provide real-time payroll data and reporting capabilities. Payroll Officer Jenny Davies says, “I send staff reports [generated from the time clock data] to supervisors and managers on a weekly basis for sign-off. We then import the approved data from time and attendance into the payroll module, making any necessary adjustments. It’s a case of not having to sit there and manually enter every timesheet, which is what we used to do. When facing 'back to school time', we could be looking at 300-400 people in the payroll. So not having to do all those manual timesheets is excellent.” Furthermore, PayGlobal’s flexibility allows Wooldridges to manage six internal different companies within the single solution. Jenny says, “Each supervisor is responsible for their area or department. If you have something for one retail section, it doesn’t mean the other retail sections are going to be the same. You can actually identify and individualise each one, if and when you need to. It doesn’t have to be across the board.”
Business Results and Return
PayGlobal manages multiple award rates, pay conditions and employee accreditations with ease, simplifying the ongoing supervision of employees’ rates and penalties. Jenny says, “If an employee is under a certain age, every birthday they get a pay rise. Even if the change is within a pay period, PayGlobal is set up to automatically update the employee’s rate to the next level of pay on the exact day. So, you do not have to worry about it.
“Rules can be set up to alert you of certain employees details, for example, our forklift drivers. We have set up a rule which will warn me that their forklift license will soon expire and they need to be advised to go and do their retraining. It’s good because you are not having to keep manual records, reports or spreadsheets, or going around thinking – I’ve got to remember to chase that up. It’s doing the pre-warning for you. It’s a definite time saver.”
Simplifying the recruitment process, PayGlobal also retains employee records within the database and allows the payroll team to terminate and then reverse-terminate employees as they return over the busy Christmas period as a casual employee. “Because they are already there, it’s real easy,” Jenny says.
As PayGlobal provides Wooldridges with a simplified data capture, reporting and payroll processing solution, it only needs to employ one payroll officer. “At one stage we had two people doing manual timesheet entry over one whole day, just to keep up with the flow. Whereas now, once the reports are approved, it’s a four to five hour turnaround time. It’s definitely a big time saver, a three to four hour time difference thanks to the new processing. Plus, during our quieter times, it can be done in a couple of hours,” Jenny says.
And PayGlobal is simple to use. “It is so much easier than the old system managing manual time sheets and keying in data. PayGlobal does all the calculations for you and I find that the most important part for timesaving,” Jenny says.
Get in touch
- Customer Call Centre Australia
- 1800 129 181
- Customer Call Centre New Zealand
- 0508 104 357
“I’ve worked on another payroll system in retail and the payroll was just a pain. As PayGlobal is Microsoft-based, it’s easier to use and understand.”
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