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Derry City & Strabane District Council is one of eleven Councils within Northern Ireland. They are a Local Authority with approximately 1,000 employees and are responsible for a range of vital services for people and businesses, including planning, waste and recycling services, building control, and local economic and cultural development.
When the Council started to feel constrained and frustrated by the lack of flexibility in their payroll system, they commenced a search for a new system that would address their pain points and provide much needed automation. Their system was not date based and required a lot of manual input, putting unnecessary pressure on the payroll team. Furthermore, the sickness scheme was a largely manual process, making it prone to errors. Frustrated by these limitations they began a formal procurement process to replace the problematic system.
A comprehensive tender was issued UK wide to allow for a good catchment of potential providers. The tender specified the requirement to harmonise payroll and HR processes and several high-quality responses were received. After a competitive tendering process, Frontier Software’s CHRIS payroll system was chosen by the Council. A big win for the Council’s payroll team was the new system’s date driven capability allowing changes to be made at any time. This enabled forward planning and resulted in far less pressure on the team at peak/ busy periods, such as year-end.
The Council’s Payroll Manager has no hesitation in recommending the CHRIS software and is always happy to demonstrate the practical day to day functions that are so beneficial to users; particularly management of the occupational sick pay scheme, year to date and prior years pay history and timesheet input. The Council also required the programming of an existing bonus system into CHRIS and work was undertaken by a skilled consultant who was on hand to support the Council throughout. The design implemented by Frontier Software proved very successful and was much easier to use than the old bonus system. The Payroll Manager said this “demonstrated the software’s flexibility and the Frontier consultant, with vast payroll experience, was able to suggest a lot of adaptations”, he added: “having a consultant on hand removed a lot of the pressure for our payroll team”, and concluded “throughout our partnership with Frontier, we’ve had no security breaches, the system meets our strict audit guidelines and regular updates ensure compliance with regulations.”
Frontier Software has been delivering software solutions to support payroll teams in the public sector for 40 years. Date driven software with highly configurable automation tools ensures interactions that create the right balance for your organisation and your people. Real-time data is readily available for accurate and informed decision making.
More Information:
Contact Frontier Software on 01276 456902, email sales@frontiersoftware.com or visit our website www.frontiersoftware.com.