Payroll management case study

THE CLIENT

The Bromley by Bow Centre is community charity based in east London and they are closely affiliated with Bromley by Bow NHS Health Partnership. They have strategic partnerships with a wide range of organisations and funders in the local community, and together they design and deliver highly effective programmes that transform peoples’ lives.

THE CHALLENGE

(1) Implement a Project Financial Management System (PFMS) to enable better recording, tracking and cost allocation across their 40+ services, activities and community projects

(2) Provide a simple and intuitive and repeatable solution for department heads to record monthly resource allocations to inform payroll and cost allocation without administrative burden

(3) Maintain confidentiality around payroll whilst enabling approved people to view high level staff costs for each project

THE SMARTSHEET SOLUTION

A project master sheet tracks new and current projects with funding information; this can be accessed at all times by Finance and PMs.

Finance imports confidential payroll information; various sheets and reports link the projects with staff whose time allocations can be input by PMs without compromising salary details, but which simultaneously give the team high level visibility over staff costings per project.

Salary calculations are done automatically in a linked confidential sheet and Finance receive an exported copy to run payroll against.

All information is automatically archived each month, enabling a full history and metrics to be produced.

Multiple funding sources per project can be easily be tracked and changes to funding or project timings easily tracked.

THE OUTCOME

Whilst this appeared initially as a simple solution to build, data confidentiality complicated matters, requiring out-of-the-box solutions.

The client is delighted as the project master sheet gives him full visibility over all projects and their status at any given moment; much time has been saved from just this with update requests facilitating the process.

The cross-sheet references assist greatly with the easy time allocation of staff to projects by the PMs, ensuring managers are not over-allocating staff plus showing with report filters time and costs spent in each project.

The payroll aspect is uncomplicated and intuitive, saving much time with historic data for salaries and project allocation retained for future use.

CLIENT TESTIMONIAL

"I’m delighted with the simple and intuitive solution Fiona and Rich developed for the BBBC. I researched various alternative options, but the solution and approach Prodactive proposed was by far the best option and demonstrated clear value for money. The outcome has exceeded my initial expectations

They have designed a simple and intuitive solution that is saving us countless hours each month in managing the project-related payroll, as well as providing invaluable visibility and metrics across the projects and a much-needed history that we can refer back to. They were very easy to work with, responded quickly and were very flexible where we had to adjust some requirements over the course of the development.

This has really opened my eyes to the power of Smartsheet and other solutions we can go on to implement with it building on these learnings and I have no hesitation in recommending Prodactive to others looking to develop time-saving solutions."

John Axon, Interim Finance Director, BBBC