Craegmoor Healthcare is the UK’s leading independent provider of specialist care for adults and young people. Craegmoor has 220 care homes, supporting living units and independent hospitals, as well as specialist educational colleges that care for and support over 4000 people. It currently employs more than 6500 members of staff.

The need for software

From 1996 to April 2007, Craegmoor outsourced to an external pay bureau, which provided Craegmoor with a fully managed pay service. In 2004, a Time and Attendance system was implemented that was then managed by a team of five people, to monitor the time and attendance information sent to the bureau. The introduction of this system also led to process changes in-house and changed the role performed by the external bureau. It became apparent at the beginning of 2006 that the current arrangement with the pay bureau was no longer working for Craegmoor: costs were increasing and error rates were unacceptable. In August 2006, the board agreed to purchase specialist payroll software, to bring payroll administration in-house. The overall objectives were to: have tighter control on staffing costs; reduce payslip costs; link data feeds to other working systems for more up-to-date information and to streamline the recruitment process, whilst looking at the payroll function.

About the system

To ensure that the most suitable application was chosen, Craegmoor asked an external consultant to compare the different software applications available in the marketplace. It was decided after extensive evaluation to purchase KCS’ HR and Payroll software - Now delivered by Sage HR & Payroll - due to the flexibility it offered in terms of manual data entry & bulk uploads and also the available support service. Craegmoor also liked the system’s usability and the variety of useful functions, in particular the facility to look at historic or waiting temporary data previews.

Another essential benefit of the system was the flexibility to easily integrate it with Craegmoor’s existing applications. Integration means that the payroll system automatically feeds data into several systems in the business, including time and attendance and management information systems, thus fulfilling the objective of providing real-time data across the business.

Implementing the software has had far-reaching benefits for the Craegmoor payroll team. In terms of reports, the software allows the payroll team to easily extract ad hoc reports from various fields and dates within different modules in the system, with the additional facility to ‘sum’ and filter in a format of their choice. This has proved to be an immediate saving, as each report requested from the old bureau supplier had incurred a cost. The application has also enabled the team to look at improving internal controls and also put in place a complete directory of payroll processes that have helped them meet their businesses goals, such as saving costs and identifying & resolving employees’ queries more efficiently.

Further benefits realised through the software include:

• Nine payrolls reduced to three
• Pay rules input into one system
• Delivery of accurate management information
• Easy identification of any errors in pay e.g. overtime
• Anticipated saving of in excess of £1 million over the next 5 years, against the costs of running payroll when using the bureau service
• System delivery £87K under budget, as a direct result of early delivery and efficient project management
• The accuracy of pay has increased, with the error rate falling from 1.88% to 0.23%

Debbie Broadway, Payroll and Recruitment Manager for Craegmoor, comments: “Since implementing the software our lives have been made so much easier. Not only do we have the information we need, when we need it, we no longer need to worry about data accuracy or exceeding our budgeted costs.”