The Background
This client is a voluntary,
not-for-profit organisation and is a registered charity under company law. They have
a national network of nine resource centres providing a range of services to disabled
people and their families. Additionally, the organisation also provides outreach
services from these Resource Centres. The organisation is primarily funded by the
government through the Health Service Executive (HSE).
The Situation
Prior to AscenTrust taking over the payroll, this not-for-profit organisation processed
payroll in-house. Even though no problems were noticed the decision to outsource
was driven by a need to reduce costs. Charities are suffering a reduction in donations
and grants, at the same time the demand for services is increasing. Put simply,
the not-for-profit organisation had to get more, for less.
The Solution
When moving from an in-house system to outsourcing a little more planning is
required to ensure a smooth change over. This is because the processes are not already
in place to outsource the payroll work. AscenTrust quickly established the process
by which the payroll can be outsourced easily. The work to be done by HR and that
which is to be done by Finance was clearly outlined. To give the customer the confidence
that the changeover was going to work, in the first month the payroll was processed
as usual by the not-for-profit organisation while AscenTrust ran a parallel payroll run
but without doing the bank transactions. There were no differences
in the two outputs, so in the second month AscenTrust took over completely. There
were no glitches. AscenTrust not only processed the payroll but also prepared the
input for the payroll by interfacing with the HR and Finance departments. An email hotline was established for employees to have their queries answered
directly by AscenTrust.
From the beginning, AscenTrust continued to produce an output equivalent to the
original system, but at a fraction of the cost. The cost savings are commercially
sensitive but were very considerable.
In the middle of 2009, the Health Service Executive (HSE) which provides much of
the funding this organisation changed the reporting requirements. The not-for-profit
organisation provides a 26 county service and the HSE now demanded that salary costs
be broken down according to the HSE district that they are delivered. Some of the
employees provide services to more than one HSE district. Initially, the accounting
staff thought that they would have to breakdown data from the payroll system in
spreadsheets to produce the reports required to obtain the grants. When they learnt
that AscenTrust can produce these reports they were delighted.
The Outcome
The not-for-profit organisation had benefited so significantly that it is exploring
handing over additional work to be processed by AscenTrust. Some of the benefits are:
- Very considerable cost savings on internal salary versus
outsourced service cost.
- No further need to own and maintain a PC and software for
payroll which resulted
in a saving of approximately Euro 500.00
per year.
- HSE reports which saved the accounting staff 4 hours per
month in producing the
reports manually.
- Most employee payroll queries are now handled directly by
AscenTrust while some are addressed in conjunction with HR.
Employee satisfaction with payroll has actually increased, due
to the prompt
responses to queries.
- AscenTrust simulated what-if scenarios for the organisation to
study the impact
of planned increments, and for individual
employees who were considering work pattern
changes
- Based on HSE scales, AscenTrust calculated the pay
adjustments made to the employees
saving days of work for the
accounting staff
- Problems were identified with the pension deductions, and
AscenTrust sorted these
out directly with the company's
pension provider.
- As expense reimbursements to employees were being paid out
separately from payroll
in a tedious process, AscenTrust has
guided the customer to pay this along with
payroll to achieve
further savings in the accounting work.
