HR and Payroll Challenges of a growing city

The population of the City of St. John's, NL has been growing. As the city grows, so does its need for increased staffing within government and a more sophisticated HRIS software that can deal with payroll complexities. Every two years, St. John’s conducts a needs analysis for their information technology needs. . The 2005-2007 strategic plan indicated that the city needed new financial software. They selected Great Plains (now Microsoft Dynamics GP) and hoped that their vendor would be able to give them the payroll upgrade they were looking for. Microsoft Dynamics GP however has a standard payroll module that was not able to handle their complex payroll calculations. Bonnie Arns, the HRIS manager undertook a review of 22 software systems that were compatible with Great Plains.

Life before StarGarden:

• Payroll was a time consuming and frustrating exercise as they used spreadsheets to determine calculations
• Tracking schedule and costs by employee was difficult
• Lacked visibility in reports for financial planning and budgeting
• Errors caused due to duplicate entries in different systems were prevalent

St. John’s objectives for the onboarding of new HR system:

• Reduce the time, errors, and redundant entries involved in payroll processing
• Ensure they were paying employees accurately without a ton of manual intervention
• Have a HR/payroll and Scheduling solution that would accommodate complete integration with Great Plains as well as ROE Web
• Enable managers to calculate job costing by dollars and by percentage, track dollars to schedules, and use the workflows to generate more employee and manager self-service
• Get real-time information for reporting and budgeting purposes

Role StarGarden’s Integrated HR system plays at St.John’s:

• StarGarden maintains St. John’s entire history of all positions, not just individuals
• The table based system keeps the rules straight about the organization and its structure, compensation and benefit plans, accruals/balances, and employees, while respecting the complex relationships between these elements
• It effectively simulates St. John’s actual structure and processes with start and end dates for every piece of information
• It provides a necessary foundation for the effective reporting and forecasting demanded by St. John’s municipal executives
• Provides the accuracy required for payroll and accounting functions.

In their own words: