John Goss Projects’ new automated payroll

The business situation

Add to this the relative complexity of manually combining output from a payroll system for 200 employees in far-flung locations, exacerbated by the need to extract and collate data from disparate systems. This was the situation for Kym Thompson, Financial Controller at John Goss Projects (JGP) a South East Queensland, Australia, electrical and airconditioning company.

Integration, automation, financial analysis & reporting, simplicity of use and connectivity now and into the future became the key drivers for the decision to radically overhaul the current system.

The company spent some time carefully and thoroughly evaluating several system options after discounting the idea of ‘fixing’ the incumbent systems. What turned out to be a two-year evaluation process could hardly be called a ‘snap decision’, so when the decision was finally made to implement several Greentree modules, JGP was confident it had ‘done its homework’.

Payroll, Job Costing & General Ledger integration saves time

With a diverse workforce of 200 employees covered by four Enterprise Bargaining Agreements, the processing of payroll was somewhat complex, so Kym Thompson looked long and hard at what Greentree had to offer. A core activity for JGP is the costing of jobs and Kym says, “Integration with job costing and general ledger has saved many hours of manual entries”, and she sees huge potential to further streamline the costing and payroll processes.

Payroll integrates with Job Costing so payroll costs can be directly charged to jobs, and having backwards and forwards integration with other Greentree modules will save heaps of time for JPG.

Excel extraction – frees up time for critical analysis and reporting

Kym is enthusiastic about the potential Excel offers in terms of storing, extracting and manipulating data to create reports in Greentree. Most financial management people are already familiar with Excel, and the ability to drill-down, extract and create user-defined reports in Greentree just makes the whole process painless. Kym says Excel data extraction “has automated job costing reports and financial statements, which previously took four days to produce and with valuable time saved, focus can be shifted to critical analysis of outputs and improvements in systems”.

Online help is actually helpful

Kym made a point of commenting on and seemed surprised that the online help is actually “very helpful”. Rather than the usual direction of “put this in that box”, there is some explanation of the options and integration process.

Phased implementation - little disruption to business continuity

The Greentree partner was very capable and implementation was completed on time and within budget. Kym explains how the “phased installation was a huge advantage – with no hard close-off from one system to another, balances and historical [data] could be loaded over two weeks while still entering the current month’s data”. This is a big relief for any business, and horror stories are numerous around massive budget blow-outs due to projects creeping past due date.

Staff at JGP and particularly the payroll staff are “excited by the software”, according to Kym, and have really taken to it. The familiar Windows-based environment meant little time on training and this, coupled with ontime phased implementation, meant there was little disruption to business continuity.

As far as Kym Thompson is concerned, Greentree has delivered what was promised, and solved the integration and automation problems created by the use of disparate systems and manual processes. “[At this point] we have only scratched the surface of the range of functions in Greentree and are excited by the possibilities for the future incorporation of other technologies and greater communication with our branches in [other Australian States].”