How Employment Hero helped this swim school save $10k a month by making HR & payroll swimmingly simple

About Fulton Swim School

Fulton Swim School’s mission is as clear as its pools: teach every child in Aotearoa the life skill of swimming and water safety. The team runs lessons year-round (including school holidays) in indoor pools heated to ~32°C, and caps every class at five learners per teacher. With six locations operating today and a seventh on the way, consistency and clarity in their HR operations mattered as much as what was happening in the water.

General Manager Kimberley Webster has worn all the caps – HR, GM and payroll – but today she focuses on steering the ship while her team runs day-to-day people operations. 

From platform soup to one source of truth

When she joined about four and a half years ago, the tech stack looked like a whirlpool. HR, rostering and timesheets, payroll, and training all sat on different platforms. Staff updates happened in a Facebook group that many younger employees didn’t use. Even simple changes like updating a roster took too many clicks across too many tabs.

In Kimberley’s words, it was “just a mess.”

That changed when FSS moved to Employment Hero. Onboarding, rostering and pay finally lived in the same platform. The immediate effect was less tab-hopping and far fewer manual exports; the deeper impact was confidence. Processes became repeatable, trackable and visible to the right people.

Despite not coming from an accounts or payroll background, Kimberley picked up the system quickly. Training her EA to run payroll was, as she puts it, “super easy”, and the rest of the team finds day-to-day HR straightforward. Resilience improved because work was no longer bottlenecked with one person, and confidence rose with it. As Kimberley put it:

“Everything… is just so easy to use. It’s really, really easy.”

And it’s not just ease of use, consolidating the tolls now puts more than $10,000 per month back into the budget, and the team’s admin workload has been roughly halved.

Rostering and timesheets, with receipts

For a multi-site operation, accuracy matters as much as buoyancy. Employment Hero’s rostering and timesheets are date-stamped, time-stamped and photo-stamped, so when something looks off, there’s no guesswork.

Kimberley recalls a memorable save: a timesheet that didn’t line up with reality. With the sign-in photo and timestamp at hand, the conversation was quick and grounded.

“I was actually able to catch out an employee and say, ‘Actually, you signed in later – and here’s the evidence.’”

That kind of proof keeps the lanes honest and the relationships calm. It’s not about catching people out; it’s about settling questions with facts and moving on.

One hub for culture and comms

The move wasn’t just operational. Culture and communications came poolside too. FSS retired its staff Facebook group and shifted recognition and updates to the Employment Hero dashboard, so birthdays, Employee of the Month and site news appear where people already work.

The new analytics have also become a favourite. A quick snapshot of who’s on leave means fewer DMs and clarity without the chase.

Conclusion

Kimberley’s advice to anyone considering the switch is refreshingly practical: “Come and see how simple it is”.

Employment Hero helped Fulton Swim School swap platform sprawl for a single source of truth. Payroll is simpler. Timesheets are audit-ready. The dashboard actually gets used. The payoff is real: tens of thousands saved each year and hours back every week, which is exactly where a swim school wants to be – spending less time juggling apps and more time high-fiving new swim champs.

Want to experience Employment Hero for yourself?

Employment Hero is the all-in-one HR, payroll and recruitment platform that streamlines your employment processes so you can focus on growing your business. 

Looking to streamline HR and bring more value to your business, like Fulton Swim School? 

Book a demo with our specialists today.