Why a Major Workforce Expansion is the Best Time to Automate Payroll and Time Processes
Facing more than 200% workforce expansion, YMCA turns to an integrated payroll and time strategy.
The YMCA of Memphis & the Mid-South has one mission: to serve the community. The Memphis, Tenn.-based organization largely does this by caring for kids in before- and after-school programs.
According to Katye Houston, the YMCA's Operations Director of Business Services-Child Care, the nonprofit's child care programs have been so successful in the community that they doubled their offerings in 2019.
"I would say at least half of our association's budget goes to child care services," says Houston, noting that so far in 2019 the nonprofit added 32 before- and after-school programs covering about 7,000 students aged 5-12.
Of course, hyper-growth like that often requires fundamental operational changes. When the YMCA's part-time employee base grew from 200 to between 600 and 700 during 2019, the time was right. Houston knew it was critical for her team to move from an outdated paper- and spreadsheet-based time and attendance process to a fully automated solution.
To make the transition, Houston turned to ADP Marketplace, specifically the TSheets time and attendance platform.
Houston started in her current role in January 2019. By July, the YMCA received the contract from a local county school district to take over those 32 new programs.
"We already had 45 schools; now we're at 90-plus," she says. "We had no means of scheduling employees outside of an Excel spreadsheet. We needed a new solution."
The YMCA of Memphis & Mid-South is an ADP® client and TSheets, integrated with ADP Workforce Now®, proved to be the perfect solution for the sudden growth spurt.
"TSheets on ADP Marketplace had all the features we needed," Houston says. "I didn't look anywhere else because I thought it would work with our ADP platform. I was like, 'This is what we need and I don't want to waste time.'"
Houston explains that she searched ADP Marketplace for specific terms based on her needs, like "geo-fencing," "scheduling versus actual" and "attendance." It helped make her decision easy. "Within two weeks, we were up and running," she says
Today, using TSheets, Houston and her staff can see if someone clocked in too early, too late, or outside of the geo-fencing roles/boundaries, which was crucial for the YMCA to monitor its primarily off-site, part-time workforce.
Most of the YMCA's team members use their mobile phones to track their time, with half of team members being employees from a specific school, including cafeteria workers, teachers and office assistants. The YMCA also has iPads loaded with the TSheets app at all its school sites. "That's an option in case anyone doesn't have a smartphone," Houston says.
So far, Houston says, end users are happy because of the transparency and paycheck accuracy. For example, a supervisor can send an instant confirmation acknowledging work times and dates.
"There's no more filling out paper time sheets," Houston says. "Supervisors can see when people clocked in and that they're in an appropriate location."
Plus, if there's a discrepancy over an employee's location — for example, if a teacher takes kids to a YMCA-approved playground across the street and the geo-fencing automatically clocks them out — they can easily message their supervisor to explain the situation.
Houston says after her experience across the board — and especially how easy it was to implement and use — she would not hesitate to do it again or recommend the TSheets solution for ADP to peers.
"The integration between TSheets and ADP was just what we needed," she concludes. "We were rapidly hiring, and this solution helped us meet that critical challenge."
Build and manage a better workforce with integrated HR solutions from ADP approved partners like TSheets — ADP Marketplace.
