Carrera Millwork

Hourly declatters the payroll workflow

For over 20 years, Carrera Millwork has served the Greater Bay Area, delivering finely crafted windows, doors, moldings, and millwork for beautiful custom homes. The nature of their work means that employees are at various job sites, working on different projects, and overtime calculations need to be precise and accurate. Carrera’s controller, Adriana Preciado, is also responsible for managing hourly employees, ensuring their hours, benefits and any related payroll taxes are paid correctly and on-time. Under the old systems, the overtime calculations weren’t aligned, leading to frustrated employees attempting to decipher their complicated paychecks. On top of the already laborious task of tracking time and explaining paychecks, Adriana had to pay tax estimates manually. If she missed a payment or made a miscalculation, the business would suffer penalties from the taxe agencies. None of their processes were working together. In fact, it often seemed like their own systems were working against each other, leaving the front office and employees feeling exasperated. Adriana started her own research for a unified technology platform that can handle both time and attendance and payroll. She knew something had to change, and that’s when Hourly stepped in.

Hourly offered a reliable, precise system for time-tracking and payroll

Carrera Millwork first turned to Hourly for their time-tracking app. With employees working at the shop and on job sites across the Bay Area, focusing on the interior, exterior, and other decorative millwork, Adriana was challenged with ensuring hours worked plus any overtime was appropriately calculated. Hourly’s automated time-tracking system allows employees to clock in straight from their smartphones, for more accuracy and better oversight into where employees are working and how much time they are spending on each job. This system virtually eliminates any conflicts or questions from employees regarding the number of hours and overtime they worked during the week.

Carerra Millwork was loving the automated time-tracking system, but they were still facing difficulties with processing payroll. Using another payroll system, Adriana needed to pay taxes manually via the IRS EFTPS platform. This manual process resulted in miscalculations and missed deadlines, leading to penalties from the IRS.  After experiencing success with the time-tracking functionality, they decided to utilize Hourly’s payroll services,. This became a turning point for Carrera Millwork. Immediately, the hours worked and payroll processes merged together to create one seamless process that works together to ensure accuracy across the board. Through Hourly’s payroll platform, all taxes are calculated by the system and automatically paid to the correct agency. Gone are the days when Adriana had to spend her time making complicated calculations and manual payments. Now, everything is done directly from the Hourly platform.

Hourly’s HR services proved to be invaluable for continued success

Perhaps more alarming than the previous payroll system was the pay cycle structure utilized by Sage Business Works. Complications in time-tracking and payroll calculations stemmed from the way the pay cycle was structured. The work week spanned the days of Thursday through Wednesday, while the pay cycle was based on calendar weeks. This discrepancy caused confusion among employees around the amount of overtime they were paid for, as their overtime was calculated on the non-traditional workweek.

Carrera Millwork took advantage of the HR services offered by Hourly to restructure the pay cycle. Today, the workweek and pay cycle are based on the same days, making the calculations and pay stubs quickly understandable by employees.

Implementing this one change increased the transparency and improved the relationship between management  and employees. With a better understanding of how time-tracking and payroll work together, employees and management have more confidence in the process, leading to fewer questions and less frustration.

“Hourly has changed our entire time-tracking and payroll system, and our employees couldn’t be happier. We’re thrilled to be fostering an environment centered around trust and transparency.”

Adriana Preciado

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