Omni-Care

Payroll processing and invoicing times slashed

With payroll processing time slashed from three days to three hours and invoicing time down from a four-day job for two people to a three-hour task, Omni-Care Managing Director and founder Dale McCann has many reasons to be pleased that he switched to Attaché.

But it is knowing that he will never again find a six-figure tax overpayment that helps him sleep soundly at night.

Established in 1999 with just six carers to service Melbourne’s northern suburbs, Omni-Care has grown so rapidly that at times it has been necessary to artificially slow that growth rather than risk the ability to provide a quality service.

Today the business has 335 support workers and 30 administrative staff to cater to 6000 appointments a week, servicing the aged, people with disabilities and those in need of post-acute care.

The client list ranges from individuals to various not-for-profit organisations.

When Dale and his sister started the business it was all about kitchen table accounting and rostering. They used an Excel spreadsheet to allocate staff and track hours, while an off-the shelf QuickBooks package took care of invoices that would take hours to print.

Eventually a DOS-based rostering system was acquired, but it didn’t integrate with the accounting software. This resulted in an inordinate level of double handling and data entry, with all of the associated risks of errors.

“We were working seven days a week for those first six years and even though we had far fewer clients and staff than we do now, we were devoting 10 times the labour to accounts and wages,” Dale said.

Professional support for seamless integration

The realisation that the firm was becoming enslaved by data entry and that it was taking time and focus away from the core business of providing “great service to people in need” was more than enough to force Dale to take a long hard look at the options.

Ironically, once motivated it wasn’t a hard task. For five years Dale had been Sales and Marketing Manager for specialist accounting software firm, TransAct. He had a good insight into the workings of software companies and was aware of Attaché as a quality benchmark.

“I’m not an accountant so it needed to be pretty user friendly for a start. But because I came from a software background, we also had to be convinced that we were going to get great support because support is everything,” Dale said.

From the moment Dale met with his local team of Attaché specialists he felt comfortable, and was quickly impressed with their professionalism.

When it came to the task of getting Attaché to talk to his Canadian-sourced rostering software, he knew he had made the right decision.

“The integration required a little bit of tweaking at both ends, and both parties were very good at communicating and getting on the same page to make it seamless.

Dale is still amazed at the time he now saves. And it’s not just about time saved in data entry.

“Today, if we have an invoicing issue our girls work on it as it happens whereas it used to be an ongoing thing and there would always be 15 to 20 that were being worked on at any one time.”

Making life easier

Omni-Care runs the complete Attaché system, including Accounts and Payroll.

For executives lacking an accounting background, Dale believes the Dashboards are an ideal tool.

“When all of the history is in front of you it makes it so much easier. You’re able to get a very good picture as soon as you log in, and that’s all-important because you want to be able to access information quickly and work with it. It’s quite easy to find your way around.

“For things like dealing with WorkCover, superannuation issues taxation and GST, the Dashboard makes life so much easier.

“When you have to provide a lot of financial details to outside agencies, you need to have those details to hand and be able to break them up fairly well.

“Attaché’s strength is in making the bureaucratic maze easier, particularly for us as we get a number of exemptions from dealing with not-for-profit organisations so we need to be able to split that up.

“If you can’t pin down exact numbers, you can end up paying out an extraordinary amount of money that you shouldn’t be. In fact, only a few years ago during our manual processing era, we discovered that over a period of time we had made many GST overpayments which when totalled equated to a six figure sum.

“This can’t happen now. When you run reports regularly you know where you are at and Attaché has all manner of checks and balances and catches,” he said.

About Omni-Care

www.omni-care.com.au

• 250 carers servicing the Northern suburbs of Melbourne
• Provide community based care to the aged, disabled and people with serious medical conditions, allowing them to remain in their own environment
• Services include home, personal, respite and overnight care