San Carlos, California
Construction
Challenge
“The job costing feature gives us a better understanding of productivity and helps us gain efficiency.”
Brothers Juan and Joel Arias of Peninsula Hardwood Floors are second generation hardwood floor contractors. They found themselves spending too much time manually tracking their employees’ hours and processing payroll. Collecting and coordinating time sheets, calculating and processing payroll was taking up valuable time that they weren’t able to dedicate towards growing their business. That’s when they turned to Hourly to manage and pay their employees.
Without an automated system in place, employees were filling out their time sheets by hand and turning them into the office every week. This meant that the time sheets had to be reconciled using Excel spreadsheets, resulting in errors and a lot of wasted time that could be spent on other critical business activities.
Implementing the Hourly time tracking and payroll functionality automates and simplifies the way Peninsula Hardwood Floors tracks, manages and pays their employees.
Before Hourly, Peninsula Hardwood Floors relied on their employees to fill out their time cards manually. This was dependent on each employee’s ability to accurately record their hours and turn them in prior to the end of the pay period.
If time cards were missing, Juan had to track down each employee to get their paper time card. Once all paper time cards were received, they would be manually transferred into Excel spreadsheets to calculate the amount of time spent at each job and the amount of total time each employee worked.
By implementing the Hourly time tracking feature to all of their employees, they quickly realized what they were missing. Now, each employee tracks their time directly from their smartphone, and they can change jobs with ease in real-time. If they are sanding the floors at one location or doing the installation at another, the business owners Juan and Joel always know where their employees are and what they are working on.
While creating more transparency, this also gives Peninsula Hardwood Floors key insights into how much time and money they are spending at each job. If they see that employees are spending a lot of time on one task, they can quickly see that and correct any issues to gain productivity for future projects. The job costing functionality allows them to better estimate, track, and report on the time it takes to complete each job.
The automated time tracking means that they can say goodbye to the tedious process of manually transferring the time cards into Excel. They can pull reports, track, and manage each one of their employees’ hours as they are working.
After discovering the amount of time they could save by automating their time tracking process, Peninsula Hardwood Floors quickly decided to implement the payroll functionality as well. Prior to Hourly, payroll, state, and other taxes were not calculated until after the time card calculations were sent to the accountant. The accountant would send paper checks that would need to be printed at the office. Shortly after, they would receive the amount of their tax responsibility via email.
While the old system required emails back and forth, printing and distributing the paychecks, payroll is now completed with just the press of a button. At the moment the button is pressed, taxes are automatically paid to the IRS and the California Employment Development Department based on real-time hours that employees worked. This gives Peninsula Hardwood Floors a more realistic idea of what their business expenses are real-time and not just at the end of a pay period.
“Hourly is super beneficial because we can have real-time oversight of our expenses and liabilities each month - down to the penny.”
An invaluable benefit of making the switch to Hourly is that both Juan and Joel can review, monitor and pull reports anywhere, anytime. With both brothers having the same access level, they each know where their business stands. Even if Joel is out at one job site, he can see where all of the employees are without having to call Juan back at the office.
This saves both of them time because they aren’t having to conduct unnecessary phone calls to ensure they are on the same page. They can each reference Hourly at any given time to see the real-time results, making budgeting and managing employees easier than ever.
“The job costing feature gives us a better understanding of productivity and helps us gain efficiency.”
The ultimate goal of Peninsula Hardwood Floors is to consolidate all significant business expenses into one place, so they know at any given moment, down to the penny, where they stand to make better business decisions. With Hourly, this is now all possible. With real-time job costing, they can better anticipate how much each job will cost.
Peninsula Hardwood Floors wants to continue expanding their integration with Hourly, by incorporating the workers’ compensation feature that will calculate their amount owed based on actual hours worked, instead of just an estimate.
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