Designed and delivered to optimise and transform how our customers do business
Solution Showcase
Adherence to proven project management methodologies and tools, as well as many years experience in custom systems development, ensures that solutions deliver tangible business outcomes.
Each custom system development project is undertaken based on five primary phases being:- Requirements Confirmation, Design, Develop, Deliver, Support.
This approach ensures that initial expectations of budget, time, functionality are consistently met or exceeded.
Following are some of the software solutions that Vital Business Solutions have been responsible for:-
Web Timesheets
Company Background
Elders are an Australian ‘agribusiness’ corporation that have businesses in a number of vertical industries including Insurance, Banking, Livestock, Wool, Real Estate, Rural Merchandise and more. The Elders business is geographically spread supplying services and products from over 400 Australian branches, agencies and overseas offices.
The Situation
A large number of Elders casual staff are geographically spread across Australia including Rural and Regional Centres. Casual staff working for Elders are required to submit timesheets for the purpose of payroll due to irregular hours being worked week to week.
To date timesheets have been manually recorded and submitted to the centralised Payroll Office via a number of methods being phone, fax and e-mail.
Business Problems
Problems associated with this ‘manual’ process included:-
- No way of ensuring that all timesheets had been received by Head Office.
- Timesheets received in a number of inconsistent formats. Paper, spreadsheets, e-mails and MS word documents.
- No formal system or record of time having been approved resulting in the potential for time not being correctly approved.
- No system based check that the original timesheet lodged by the employee has not been changed by the employee supervisor prior to being received by the pay office.
- No simple way of accessing timesheet history for employees and supervisors to review previous timesheets.
- Employee supervisors having to manually follow up all employees in order to receive timesheets for approval.
- No system based check that the employee is in fact ‘Casual’ and required to enter timesheets or are ‘Salaried’ staff and hence should not be submitting a timesheet.
- Duplication of data entry of timesheet information. Recorded by employee then entered by approver in e-mail, spreadsheet or document and then again by pay office into payroll system.
- Manual calculation of overtime being inefficient, potential for inconsistency and errors in calculations.
- No system based check on if the particular employee is in fact entitled to overtime.
- No ability to prevent employees from attempting to submit timesheets before or after their employment commencement and termination dates.
- No system based check or record of who actually submitted the original timesheet for an employee.
- Timesheet approvers not being aware of or forgetting that they have timesheets to approve.
- If timesheet approver not available then timesheets potentially not being approved in a timely manner for inclusion in next pay run.
- And other problems.
The scope of the project was to solve the above business problems through the development and implementation of a Web based Timesheet Entry and Approval system.
The system had to be tightly integrated to existing HR and Payroll systems so as to not require ongoing management and updating by the Payroll Office. It also needed to be highly reliable, accurate and extremely simple to use by employees, supervisors and payroll office staff alike.
The solution was developed with the following capabilities:-
- Web based ‘centralised’ system with access provided from within companies Australia wide Intranet.
- Secure user access to system controlled by Windows domain logon.
- System is integrated to the Human Resources system so that it is automatically updated with new and changed employee details, supervisors and business rules, such as authorised approvers etc.
- Integrated to Payroll system for electronic transfer of employees, hours and other details for generation of payroll.
- Rules based employee access privileges to system for both timesheet entry and then timesheet approvals.
- Standard rules based calculations for various categories of overtime.
- Management of regional Public Holidays which impacts overtime calculations.
- Calculate and display Total Hours and various categories of Normal and Overtime Hours as timesheets and approvals are being entered and edited.
- System Administrator controlled Time Approval escalation and e-mail Reminder facilities.
- System Administrator controlled fortnightly timesheet close offs for timesheet entry and timesheet approvals.
- Automatic accumulation of multiple fortnightly timesheets for payroll interface purposes.
- System Administrator is able to set rules that control if timesheets may be entered and approved for prior and future fortnights. This control also extends to new employee start dates and terminated employee termination dates as well as controlling which fortnights timesheet entry and approvals are allowed by which business units.
- Provide a range of on demand reports to give the Payroll Office visibility and control over the timesheet entry and approval process. For example: Exception report of timesheets changed by approver from that originally entered by the employee.
- Retain a complete audit trail of all timesheet data entered, amended, deleted and other events such as employee and calendar updates, payroll interfaces, escalation, e-mail notifications and more.
Staff that either submit or are involved in the process of managing timesheets and payroll for Casual employees have reported significant benefits resulting from the development and implementation of this system.
While there are a number of direct and indirect benefits the following are the primary ones:
Improved Employee Satisfaction
Employees are grateful of streamlined process, improved visibility, access to information and less payroll errors and queries.
Reduced Cost
Through removal of manual tasks and inefficiencies prevalent in previous process and ensuring correct calculation of normal and categories of overtime.
Reduced Time
By reducing the time taken to process fortnightly payroll.
Improved Accuracy
Through online entry, by employee, of hours worked and improved accuracy in calculation of normal and categories of overtime.
Auditing
Full auditing of all transactions, updates and processes where previously there was little.
Solution Screenshots (selected examples)
(click to enlarge)
E-mail Invoices System
E-mail Invoices
One of Alerts strengths is it’s Billing facilities. Alert is used to manage the high volume billing requirements of large organisation’s. Types of billings include both Agreed Charge and Time and Material. Organisation’s that have a high number of staff and bill largely on a Time and Material basis can result in a high number of invoices being generated by Alert.
Alert provides tools to assist with, and automate as much as possible, the process of recording and approving timesheets and generating invoices.
The Problem
The last step in the process is ‘Invoice Delivery’. Previously, organization’s either printed and posted invoices or generated invoices as PDF files and then manually created e-mails, attached the files and sent the e-mails. Both approaches are manually intensive and prone to errors.
The percentage of invoices now being delivered by e-mail is increasing and is now the preferred delivery method by most organisation’s using Alert. The process of sending invoices by e-mail to date has been a manual one as follows:-
1. Invoices are generated as electronic files in PDF format
2. An e-mail is manually created for a particular recipient of invoices. Text is added to the Subject line and Body of the e-mail.
3. One or electronic invoice files are attached to the e-mail
4. The e-mail is sent
The above process is time intensive and prone to errors. It is important that invoices are only sent to the correct authorised recipients as sensitive, confidential information is contained within the invoices.
The Objective
The business objective therefore was to automate and streamline the ‘Invoice Delivery’ process of sending invoices electronically resulting in cost savings, greater customer satisfaction and more timely delivery of invoices.
The Solution
A facility has been developed in Alert (V5r2) to automatically generate and send e-mail invoices to those customers that choose to receive invoices this way.
The facility assist the user to ensure that all invoices have been sent and that they have been sent using the customers preferred method of delivery. The ‘e-mail’ invoices facility therefore allows the user to define which invoices are to be delivered by post (hardcopy) and by e-mail (electronically).
The facility has been designed to be flexible enough to cope with the different needs of different customers and different billings. For example some billings for a customer may need to be sent to different recipients for different projects or orders.
The facility allows the user to review and change aspects of the invoice e-mails prior to e-mails being sent. This ‘confirmation’ step is extremely important due to the confidential and sensitive nature of invoices.
Scope
The scope of the solution is:-
1. The solution has been developed and contained within Alert
2. Invoices to be e-mailed are limited to those that have been generated or manually entered in Alert
3. The solution uses data that is contained within the Alert system only i.e. e-mail address are required to be within Alert and are not be read from an external source
Benefits Provided
The solution proposed in this document provides the following benefits and value to Alert users:-
- Improved Productivity
- Streamlined ‘Invoice Delivery’ process
- Automation of previous manual task
- Greater customer satisfaction through invoices being sent to the correct people in a timely manner
