Eliminate $10,000 In Payroll Costs Caused By Mistakes In Employee Time Reporting

“I hated entering data manually before Workyard. Now my employees are able to submit their accurate time cards daily and then I’m able to approve them and send them to QuickBooks.”

Company Background

Kathi is Vice President at D&S Electric, a $2 million commercial electrical subcontracting company she started with her husband, Doug. Kathi is responsible for everything but bidding jobs and ordering material. Keeping track of employee time and running payroll falls on her plate.

The business got its start doing more than 1,000 McDonald's remodels and new builds. With a boom in trucking and a reinvention of truck stops in America, D&S has found a new niche working with companies like Love's Travel Stops and Quick Trip truck stops nationwide.

The Problem

With their nationwide partnership's D&S typically has crew distributed across six simultaneous projects from Tallahassee to Charleston. Kathi was relying on each team member to send their time reports before Wednesday to pay them every Friday. This rarely happened.

"I was just getting tired of chasing down time,""And, nobody could ever remember, and there would be a lot of guessing. Nobody would write anything down. It was more of our guys trying to remember what they did a week ago." Kathi told us.

All that guesswork was resulting in inaccurate payroll costs that Kathi was growing concerned about.

"Most of our guys have been with us for a long, long time. It wasn't malicious. They couldn't remember," said Kathi. "The problem was that guys would get to the job site at 7:20 but report their time as having arrived at 7:00."

Those mistakes were resulting in ballooning overtime and workers' comp costs.

"Let's say an $18/hour employee is off an hour each week. Once you factor in overtime, you're looking at more than $1,500 per employee each year just from those little mistakes," explained Kathi.

Kathi went on to say that these errors in time reporting also impact bidding on new jobs. Kathi knows from so much experience how much time a job will take, but it's hard to factor in all the errors in time reporting. When all those extra overtime hours are added up, D&S could find out they've underbid the job.

The Solution

Kathi was introduced to Workyard by her sister, who owns another electrical subcontracting company.

Workyard is now helping Kathi track her employee time more accurately. And as Kathi puts it, it's the accuracy of Workyard's GPS that has helped the most.

"This is silly, but one of our guys had to make a bunch of stops for materials and took his helper with him. Using Workyard, I could tell they were gone an hour and could see all the stops they made. It was a teaching opportunity because I was able to catch that and explain to my guy that next time it would be more effective to leave the other employee on the project," said Kathi. "I would have never known without Workyard."

Kathi can use Workyard's built-in time card alerts to help surface potential errors and then dive into each time card to audit the final time for accuracy. It only takes Kathi minutes per employee and results in payroll that she has more confidence in.

When Kathi did some quick math, she estimated the annual payroll savings for her team of 10 would be at least $10,000 per year.

Besides those hard dollar savings, it's the added conveniences of Workyard's features that save Kathi time.

"My favorite thing now is how you can copy a time card in Workyard." Kathi went on to say that she has two employees that haven't felt comfortable using the app. Kathi knows the lead guy those two crew members are working with, and she's able to quickly duplicate his time card and create new ones for those employees.

When it comes to chasing employees down to get payroll done, Kathi says it's a thing of the past.

"I hated entering data manually before Workyard. With Workyard, my employees can submit their accurate time cards daily, and then I'm able to approve them and send the final time to QuickBooks."

By saying goodbye to manual data entry, Kathi has eliminated payroll mistakes and saved herself an additional 4 hours per month of administrative work.

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