How 3rd Arm Admin Enhanced Its Payroll Delivery and Employee Performance by Creating Better Systems

Last Updated on June 1, 2020 by Owen McGab Enaohwo

Introduction

Coming on board as the practice manager at 3rd Arm Admin, Candice Burgess’s role was to enhance the organization’s operations by fine-tuning its payroll and business administration services. Staff members grappled with running payrolls successfully by the due dates as a result of clogs in the manual processes they were working with. The need to improve these processes was visible to everyone. So, when they found a system that met that need, there was no hesitation to grab it. Burgess gives us insights into the before and after in regard to using SweetProcess in their organization. First, let us take a look at the organization for better understanding.

About 3rd Arm Admin

3rd Arm Admin offers business administration services such as bookkeeping, payroll, and virtual administration solutions to businesses in New Zealand. It simplifies complex administrative tasks, giving organizations clarity and control over their financial activities.

Working with seasoned professionals, the company takes care of all the cumbersome bookkeeping and payroll activities, enabling businesses to focus on their core duties and goals without distractions from these areas.

With a current staff capacity of seven, the organization’s values include client commitment, respect, excellence, integrity, and fun.

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The Struggle to be Efficient on All Fronts

Fulfilling payroll orders requires accuracy and timeliness to get payments across to receiving parties. It is important that the transactions are successful at the right time regardless of any circumstances. Using manual tools like Microsoft Word and Excel sheets to document processes made it difficult for the company to keep up with the demands of the job, including unforeseen circumstances. Take absentee employees, for instance: there was not much that could be done when persons in charge of running certain payrolls were indisposed. How do you explain that to customers?

Burgess told us that “All the processes that were put in place were just all written up by each person who was doing them. And we just used Microsoft Word or Excel to write up all our processes, and things would just get on a server or on a hard drive for people to access…. And just keeping things up to date wasn’t always easy.”

Signing up for SweetProcess out of Necessity

According to Candice, signing up for SweetProcess was born out of a need to implement a better system in their organization. They found SweetProcess from a Google search about systems and processes. Intrigued by its uses and features, they signed up for a free trial, and that was all the convincing they needed.

Burgess stated that “There wasn’t much convincing. We liked the ease of how it was easily used. It was just an easy step-by-step thing. As soon as we started testing it, we just loved it. It was a no-brainer for us really.”

The Transformational Changes Achieved from the SweetProcess Effect

Customer satisfaction is at the center of almost any organization’s goals. Everything done connects to giving the customer the best experience at every point of their journey. Burgess reveals that this was very important to them:

“We just wanted to make sure that we had really good robust systems and processes in place. We needed to be seamless for our customers.”

Did they achieve the seamlessness they desired? Yes, and a lot more!

The benefits the organization enjoyed from adopting SweetProcess include the following:

1) Seamless Documentation

Documented business processes miss the mark when they are not comprehensive. Keeping with the idea of documenting processes to guide employees through their job, it is important that employees understand every word of it without having to consult anyone. Doing that effectively boils down to having the right tools.

A well-documented process takes a step-by-step, how-to format. Besides text, there needs to be options for images and charts to visualize certain procedures that may not be comprehensive enough using only text. SweetProcess offers all these features, simplifying the documentation process for both the creator and the user. Burgess explains how this helped her when she was new to her job:

“Payroll is one of the biggest services that we provide. We pay nearly 1,500 people a month across all the businesses that we do that for. One of the first projects of mine was to get all those payroll processes written up and put into SweetProcess. They were already written up, but they were written up in a Word document…. SweetProcess made that easy because of its step-by-step process that allows you to put in pictures and images.”

2) Remote Access to Documents

Streamlining business processes does not end with documentation. The essence of documentation is to ensure that the processes are usable by others. When the people who are meant to use them have difficulty accessing them, it goes back to square one. Accessibility was key for the organization.

“We needed processes and systems in place that we knew we could trust—that was easily accessible to all our staff,” says Burgess.

SweetProcess enabled the organization to store its processes in the cloud with user-right access to employees. Regardless of their location, authorized persons can access work files, keeping their workflow running smoothly without interruption.

“Things were systematized before, but not properly this way. We still managed to obviously run our business and provide our service and had all our processes in place, but they just weren’t as smooth as they are now and easily accessible as they are now.”

3) Reference Guide for Workers

Division of labor is a common practice in many organizations. Employees are assigned roles based on their skill set and specialization to have them do what they know how to do best. While this is commendable, it puts the organization in a difficult position when certain employees are absent. With no one else knowing how to execute their tasks, the business is held to ransom. This can be prevented if all business processes are documented in a centralized system that is accessible by all employees. In the event of absentee employees, someone else can fill the gap by using the how-to procedures documented as a guide to execute urgent tasks.

“From the customer’s point of view, if one of our staff was away and they did your payroll…anyone could pick up their job and do it based on our documentation of their processes, it was just finding the best system that we could find to allow us to do it,” states Burgess.

For Burgess, being able to do this in their organization gives them comfort.

“It’s just given us comfort that we can still continue to run no matter who’s away or who’s sick.”

4) Opportunity for Training

To maintain good quality in the delivery of their services, organizations need to train their workers to be accustomed to the latest practices in their field. This is crucial to both the organization and the employee. If the employee is trained well, it shows in their performance.

Using the right tools speeds up the training process and saves resources without compromising on high standards. With SweetProcess, 3rd Admin Arm fast-tracks training for both new and current employees. Furthermore, they use it to train their clients on how to execute certain procedures.

“We use it to put together training stuff for our clients. If there’s a process that they want to follow, we put them on the same process. We download a copy and give them a copy of it. It’s given us some more training opportunities in that way as well.”

Achieving their Next Big Goals

With the clogs in their payroll and business administration activities removed, Burgess and her team no longer break a sweat.

“It’s just easier because we’ve got these processes in place,” she says.

They are now focusing on achieving their next goals as an organization. These include increasing their clientele and staff and ramping up their social media.

“One of the reasons I was brought on board, which is becoming more apparent, is we are trying to ramp up our social media following. That’s one of our goals, just keep up to date with things, obviously, gain more clients and increase our staff.”

From the evidence on the ground, it is clear that their success is guaranteed by leveraging SweetProcess.

Replicating their Success in Your Business

Perhaps you are wondering if you can replicate their success story in your business? The answer is yes. SweetProcess offers flexibility that allows organizations to implement it in their unique business operations however they need it to. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to see how it works.

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