Beaumont Care Streamlines Payroll for Over 350 Staff

Beaumont Care is an Australian family-owned and operated care and support service provider. They offer person-centred aged care and independent living support services for people with a variety of needs.

Their team includes over 350 staff who work across a variety of roles, ranging all the way from corporate to services, nursing, caring, and support.  

We recently spoke to Amanda Webb, Program Manager and Teresa Turner, Corporate Services Manager at Beaumont Care about how foundU has helped streamline their payroll despite the complexity of delivering 24/7 care, 365 days a year.

The challenge 

Beaumont Care has a variety of rosters for each location with team members working varied shifts, day and night, under three awards, the National Employment Standards, and two enterprise bargaining agreements.  

There are many intertwining rules that need to be considered every time a team member is rostered on for a shift and paid. Prior to using foundU, this was all managed manually. A lot of knowledge was held in the payroll team’s heads or on paper.  

“We had no designated HRIS, so we had paper employee files which were locked away in the manager’s office. If staff wanted a change, they would need to go to their admin, who would email payroll, who would then make changes, and ensure that we had the correct paperwork. It was quite a manual process and it was taking us three full days to complete payroll.”  

If an employee ran out of leave, they had to manually calculate their balance and the unpaid component. Handing pieces of paper through the lines of communication meant that action times were delayed, creating room for error.

The solution 

Beaumont Care were looking for a more integrated workforce management platform. The business needed an employee management system that would update payroll automatically, better reporting capabilities, more autonomy for staff to manage their availability, and better compliance prompts for the payroll team. 

“It has streamlined the process a lot more. Staff can now upload and monitor their own documentation, with clear oversight by site management and admin. If their tax details or circumstances change, they can enter the new details and we get an automated notification of the update. We don’t have to have all of that back and forth, it just automatically happens with the next pay run. Our processes have come down in time quite a lot. There is still an element of human error, but it’s easier to recognise and fix, resulting in a significant reduction in adjustments and corrections.” 

New integrations have added value to the platform over time and the team has since connected the employee management system with SuperPath and Connect Psych Services to develop learning pathways and deliver an Employee Assistance Program. 

foundU's dashboards were also a big drawcard for the team, particularly admin staff looking after the rosters. They enjoy using the front-page and approve shift dashboards to get a quick status update.  

“The award test is really popular with our managers because they can very clearly see what’s getting paid before they do their approvals. They can change the filters and clearly see a full breakdown of what someone is being paid and why. There are so many scenarios to account for, like overtime if you do more than eight hours a day or ten shifts in a fortnight. So, it’s helped train the managers in understanding a lot of the rules around rostering while creating more awareness on how to monitor employee fatigue. We’re a 24/7 business, so overtime is unavoidable. But, now they think about this when they’re creating the roster, rather than trying to understand why overtime has kicked in by the time they’re processing payroll.” 

Using the dashboards and reports, the team doesn’t have to wait for payroll to happen once a fortnight to pick up if someone has missed approving a shift. Pay slips are generated throughout the pay cycle and can be checked by employees, resulting in less payroll adjustments. 

Despite all of Beaumont Care’s reports coming out of their old system in a PDF format, the implementation process was made as easy as possible. 

“We had a really good experience with the sales team and that just continued on. Our implementation manager at the time was a dream to work with and we were able to go live within three months for the payroll just before Christmas. It was very ambitious, but we did it. Any errors were fixed quickly because of the open communication and access to the testing environment where we could throw every scenario at the system. Every time we send an email, there’s always a quick reply. We’re able to reach out to our Customer Success Manager for support and go back to the people who helped build the system if when we have needed something after the point of handover.” 

The result 

The team is now spending just one day processing payroll with about half of the following day used to answer any queries that come up. Since all employee documentation is uploaded and saved to employee profiles, it’s easier to monitor information and there is less risk of incorrectly paying staff. 

“We no longer have to do manual calculations for important entitlements, such as breaks and overtime. We're also not relying on knowledge held by each individual, which created risk when we had absences and someone else had to fill in. We’re saving time and our processes are far more streamlined and compliant.”

Want to find out how our workforce management software can simplify your payroll, scale your workforce, and grow your business too? Book a demo to start exploring our platform.