Complete Recruitment Solutions save 2 days per week streamlining recruitment, timesheets, payroll and invoicing with Access FastTrack360

In 2017, Complete Recruitment Solutions started looking at changing from their current software. Liz Smith, Managing Director of the business for over a decade, found a problem that most businesses, if not all, will run into during their lifecycle.

Our previous software was a great package, but it was a bit rigid, and wasn’t keeping up with the times or developing quickly enough.

It wasn’t a decision we took lightly, because we’d been with that database for so long. I had basically been using that database since I started in the recruitment industry 20 years ago. However, a cloud based solution and the ability to automate a lot of things that the business was doing manually at the time was attractive.

Liz started by creating a list of suitable providers.

I started with Google and then spoke with friends in the market about what they were using. And then I contacted industry body RCSA.

Having put together a list of partners, the next step was to look at the business-critical functions.

I had a list of things we wanted to be able to do that we couldn’t do with the current database. There was a lot of double-ups, a lot of manual tasks we had to do.

Ideally we did want a fully integrated system because that’s what we were used to. But some of the products that were offering that, lacked in other areas. We didn’t want to go from one software package to three. The charging structure just wasn’t financially viable for our business. We didn’t want to pay per payee. We have a larger industrial Labour Hire division, so there are candidates that might only work 4 hours per week, it just didn’t make sense for us.

The process involved prioritising or triaging what was essential, and what was a ‘like’, rather than a ‘must-have’. That cancelled a few products out. Then, I looked at the different partnerships within the new software, and then obviously cost of the software as well.

The business-critical features for Complete Recruitment Solutions depended on each division.

For the industrial labour hire division, for example, it was:

• Being able to roster each employee;
• Being able to easily create and manage documents within the software;
• Easily capture timesheets and run payroll based on interpretation against agreements and awards; and
• The ability to import data, such as the automatic creation of candidates from resumes.

Prior to this, we did all of our payroll manually. Having all of that automated was a big positive for us. Being able to automatically capture candidate applications instead of manually entering the information was also huge for us. Plus, having a skill base or keyword library already in the system that could be linked to candidates automatically through parsing was a very attractive feature.

Another big drawcard for us was a cloud-based solution and the integration with different partners, including finance system Xero.

Liz then organised for each of the shortlisted providers to demonstrate their software as well as their ability to meet her list of essential requirements.

On top of key features and functions Liz also had another key selection criterion when selecting the right partner.

It was the understanding of our business.

I guess you’d call us boutique and not everybody is the same. So it was very important to me that the company understood our business, and what our processes were.

In many of the demonstrations with other systems, they showed how we would have to change in the way we operate to be able to use it. I feel that change is good, especially when you have been around for a while as you can get stuck in your old ways. But it was trying to squeeze certain things into that type of software. Some of the key features that just weren’t going to work for us were highlighted at this stage.

By selecting the Access FastTrack360 platform, Complete Recruitment Solutions have been able to make things more streamlined across the board, meaning everyone in the business benefits.

Being able to produce good reports on all of our data and having all of our payroll automated has really helped along with the feature of interpreting awards and agreements.

The area where we see a large gain in productivity was by removing the manual data entry. Previously it would take up to 25 minutes to manually enter each candidate with a lot of room for human error. Now a large portion of it happens automatically. We have also been able to refine our process quite a lot. Consultants now have more options to manage candidates, with options to fill out additional fields such as interview notes in the system.

Previously we solely had paper timesheets coming through. We would then manually enter the candidate’s name, the week ending date and number of hours for ordinary, time and half, adding any allowances individually. The pay rates would be in the job orders so that would come across, but for the actual calculation of when it would go into overtime and when allowances are applicable, we would work that out manually beforehand. But to be honest we don’t have too many complicated clients. We had lots of different awards we were using but they were pretty standard conditions, many candidates were working 38 hours, overtime after 7.6 or 8.

There was room for error because it was all done manually. It could be 5 adjustments a week we had to fix. Plus, the calculations probably took a day to do that and prior to that it would take a full day to collate all the timesheets.

We were having to manually scan in invoices, attach timesheets and then individually email them out to clients. That would probably take accounts 2 hours each week just to do that. We could upload a timesheet to the system, but it didn’t have any way to manage the calculations and if a client wanted a timesheet attached, that was the way we had to do it.

In a bad week that means it would probably take us 3 days all up, from getting the timesheet to invoicing clients.

Now in our commercial division where we are using the Access FastTrack online timesheets it’s only taking one day to get the timesheets, run payroll and invoice clients. Plus, we are now down from 5 adjustments to 1 per week on average.

While we had teething problems at the start, we are only just a year in and the benefits have been great. Our consultants now have better insights across the business and my time has been freed up. It used to take me 2 days to manage commissions each quarter as our old system just didn’t have the report functions that Access FastTrack does. To be able to do a couple of clicks and actually get the real revenue rather than the approximate is huge.

As for whether Liz would recommend Access FastTrack, the answer was a simple one.

We would, we’re happy!