Eliminate Payroll Mistakes & Save Thousands In Admin Expenses

“Workyard gave me a boost in confidence that I could identify issues and come up with a solution. I can now say that we haven’t had a payroll issue in 3 months.”

Company Background

Dana Almaraz runs human resources, accounts receivable, and payroll at Allied Restoration. The company was started in 2008 by Dana's father and late uncle, who got the entrepreneurial bug after working in construction. Allied has grown from that two-person company to a team of 45 full-time employees across multiple divisions.

Allied helps homeowners recover their homes after floods and fires, managing things from repair to complete rebuilds from the ground up. Allied helps the homeowner negotiate with the insurance companies to get the repairs covered. The company then works with a combination of in-house employees and subcontractors to get the job done.

The Problem

Allied has seen rapid growth over the last four years with a tripling of the company's revenue. As their business has scaled, they've grown to rely on time tracking software to help them accurately track employee time and streamline payroll.

As they grew, they started to experience accuracy issues with their time tracking system, resulting in lots of stress and additional admin expenses of at least $1,000 a month.

The weight of those new challenges fell squarely on Dana's shoulders.

"Being the manager of our payroll, it's my responsibility to make sure people feel confident in the accuracy of their paychecks," says Dana. "We were changing things after the fact to get it right. We were spending hours and hours of extra work on payroll."

And Allied's employees reminded Dana of those mistakes every payday.

"I would process payroll, and I was waiting for people to line up at my door. That's how it was for a month. It was a tremendous amount of stress."

The Solution

With the amount of time Dana and her team were spending on issues caused by their time tracking software, she realized it was time to look for something else. That's when she found Workyard.

From the beginning, she knew she had found a way to solve her payroll problems.

"The amount of customer service I got from Workyard was unparalleled. Any issue I had, the Workyard team took it seriously. The support team even educated us on overtime rules and compliance. It gave me the confidence that Workyard would keep track of and calculate our employee hours accurately."

Workyard helped Dana transition from her previous time tracking solution by integrating directly with her QuickBooks accounting software, which made syncing projects, employee, and hours worked data a breeze.

Dana was also impressed with how quickly she could switch to Workyard, thanks to how easy the mobile apps were for her employees to use.

"Having the interface be so simple, it's been easy to train our employees to manage their own time."

In addition to tracking her employee hours for more accurate payroll, Dana was also concerned with keeping an eye on labor costs by individual project. Workyard made it easy for Allied Restoration employees to allocate their hours to projects and cost codes. It also offered an elegant solution to real-time requests her team had to respond to before someone could set up those projects in Workyard.

"New projects come in over the weekend or at night before we can add them to our database. Some of the jobs don't even have job numbers to reference. Because Workyard allows our employees in the field to allocate their hours to a physical address, it eliminates all the back, and forth we experienced with our previous time tracking software."

The Impact

Dana can measure the impact of switching to Workyard in thousands of dollars thanks to the reduction in admin work previously spent correcting mistakes caused by her previous time tracking software. But it's also offered her a boost in self-worth.

"I'm a part of the director's team. Every time we had a meeting, I had to explain all the issues we were having with payroll to the team. I felt a large responsibility to solve this problem, and as the owner's daughter, I wanted people to feel confident that I could do my job well."

Now that she's using Workyard, Dana says she can go to those director's meetings with her head held high. "Workyard gave me a boost in confidence. I can now go to the director's meeting and say we haven't had a payroll issue in 3 months."

And she's finding ways to use Workyard to improve profits even more. Thanks to tracking the company's labor costs by projects, Dana and her team can look for ways to move people around to have better profit outcomes.

"With our Emergency Mitigation Services team last year, we were doing a lot of overtime and double time. Every payroll, I was raising those rising labor costs with the team. So, we started asking questions like, do we hire more people, do we outsource?"

Dana went on to say that thanks to the data Workyard provides, they can recognize those opportunities before it's too late and make decisions that keep the company aimed towards growth.

"Without using Workyard to monitor, it's going to get out of hand really fast."

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