With a heritage spanning more than 30 years, Stedmans has earned a stellar reputation for excellence in corporate hospitality. The specialist staffing agency has become the first choice for premier event companies, caterers, venues, restaurants and private clients.
For such a successful, people-intensive business, efficient systems are vital. But when transitioning to a new accounting platform, Stedmans found it was extremely difficult to integrate new software with the company’s existing payroll and staff rostering systems. Stedmans was relying on standalone systems and as a result, data for payroll, invoicing and recruitment was siloed.
“All up, I’d say we save about 20 hours each week across the departments, which adds up to between 80-100 hours a month, depending on how busy we are!”
Nicholas Luhman, Recruitment Coordinator
Prior to signing on with Employment Hero, timesheets were all double handled, with the accounts department needing to manually enter timesheets after they were signed off by supervisors. Accounts then applied a control report from the rostering system to calculate hours worked and at what rate, before manually entering this into a separate accounting platform.
When new employees joined the Stedmans team, they were met with the standard mountain of paperwork including superannuation and tax declaration, as well as passport and visa checks for international workers. New starters were then entered into the rostering system, before their paperwork was stored in filing cabinets.
“While we’d been running this rostering system for about 15 years,” explained Nicholas Luhman, Recruitment Coordinator, “the inability to integrate it with our other business systems meant we had to find another way.”
Streamlining the process
Joana Oliveira, Office Team Leader at Stedmans, was intent on finding software to streamline these processes and make the business operations more efficient. She came across Employment Hero when searching for recruitment and automated onboarding systems. When she discovered Employment Hero offered payroll functionality as well, she was very interested.
“At first glance, we could see that Employment Hero was the answer to our needs,” says Joana. “We trialled the software and really liked how easy it was to use, as well as how in tune the team at Employment Hero were with our unique needs.”
Smooth transition for Stedmans
During the transition period, Stedmans customised Employment Hero’s functionality for their specific requirements. The company also chose to handle some aspects of the implementation themselves, including uploading all employee files and records into Employment Hero. While this delayed the transition timeframe somewhat, it also helped Stedmans minimise costs.
“Overall, the transition to Employment Hero was smooth and their implementation team proved to be efficient and responsive to any queries we had.”
All systems go!
Since moving to Employment Hero, Stedmans has been able to integrate their bookings process with their accounts and HR systems.
“We now have one unified system that eliminates duplication and double-handling,” adds Joana.
“This has freed up time in each department that we’re now redirecting to other areas of the business. For instance, the human resources team can now focus on recruiting high quality staff, placements and staff development.”
For Nicholas, the onboarding process has been transformed. “Onboarding used to take me at least one hour per new employee. Now it takes about one minute.”
Onboarding down from 60 minutes to 1 minute.
“With Employment Hero, new hires complete all the HR forms online. We are also able to upload employment contracts and workplace policies for the staff to acknowledge and sign online. All employee information, including their initial application form, now resides in one centralised location that you can access at any time.
“Because of the nature of our business and our reliance on students and working holiday makers, high turnover is a fact of life.
“With the responsibility to complete all the necessary HR forms online falling on the individual workers, we save so much time in HR admin, increasing the accuracy and timeliness of the information.
“In fact, in terms of the time it takes to get a new employee up and running in our booking system, and ready to be rostered on a job, it’s a maximum of five minutes.
“With all this time freed up from process-driven paperwork, I’ve now been able to turn my attention to the future. For us, this means growing our people and investing in performance management.”
