Time & Attendance System Reduces The Time A Retirement Community Company Spends On Payroll

Freedom Group, Inc. (Boulder, CO), a manager of retirement communities, is one of the nation's leading providers of life-care services. Freedom Group's amenities, services and healthcare programs include recreational and leisure benefits. Also included are dining services, scheduled transportation, professional maintenance and housekeeping, assisted living and skilled nursing services.

Manual Timekeeping Is Timely
Freedom Group, Inc. employs over 2,500 people to provide these services. Each community "campus" formerly used a manual-entry payroll system. This required all employees to calculate their own time sheets and turn them in to their manager, who spent an entire day every pay period calculating payroll.

Managers now spend a couple of minutes reviewing data. "Pay periods were always a nightmare", said Sandy Dangelo, accounting manager. "Each campus had its own rules and made subjective decisions. Manual calculations were sometimes incorrect and people were not paid uniformly - some were underpaid and some were overpaid."

Automation Centralizes Pay Functions
Switching to automated timekeeping systems from Unitime Systems, Inc. centralized Freedom Group's pay period functions. "Early on we went with Freedom Group to design the best way for our hardware and software to meet its objectives. We also wanted the solution in the most cost-effective manner," said Bill Korstad, president, Unitime Systems, Inc.

"All campuses running Unitime have information at their fingertips to better manage their individual sites. This information is transmitted to corporate headquarters over the WAN for consolidation, historical reporting and eventual upload to Abra for payroll processing," Korstad added. "Unitime provides both local control and centralized processing," Korstad concludes.

Healthcare Industry Requires Reports
"Our industry requires us to expense time correctly," said Sandy Dangelo. "We compile cost reports for Medicare and Medicaid. These reports must be accurate and Unitime has been very valuable for this function. Also, we chose the historian feature to supply managers with up-to-the-minute reports and to become aware of past trends and seasonal patterns. Now we're able to hire new personnel accordingly."

"Every one of these automated functions has translated to a money-saving benefit. Our managers save time and have decision-making assistance with facts and figures at their fingertips and employees are spending time doing the jobs they were hired for instead of calculating time sheets," says Dangelo.

Software Integrates With System
"We chose Unitime Systems because of the flexibility it afforded and the ease of integration with our Abra system. Each campus' Employee Services Director is shown the entire system and its managers learn how to extract reports. Once each campus' system is up and running, we closely monitor them through their entire monthly accounting cycle and then they are on their own." concludes Dangelo.