How Avanti helped United Safety manage their payroll more effectively and save over $250,000 annually

Wes Quintin
Daryl Helmer, CFO at United Safety

“Effectively, we now have one person managing the weekly payroll of over 700 employees. We would not have been able to do that without Avanti. We would’ve had to hire an additional eight to ten data entry people, so that’s saving us at least $250,000 in annual salaries.”

Daryl Helmer, Chief Financial Officer

Client Profile
United Safety provides safety products, safety consulting, and safety training for industrial projects all over the world. From small jobs to massive long-term projects, they specialize in providing a variety of safety services for the oil and gas industry.

The Challenge

A cumbersome and time-consuming payroll process with ADP

In 2009, United Safety had a change in ownership. The new shareholders of the company wanted to grow the business globally, and were looking for ways to make the organization more efficient.

Daryl Helmer, the Chief Financial Officer, saw this as the perfect opportunity to modernize the company’s payroll process.

The problem? They were using ADP WorkforceNow, which was very cumbersome for Daryl’s team. They had to enter all the payroll information manually, and there were a lot of errors happening that were out of payroll’s control.

Plus, because United Safety’s payroll was processed semi-monthly instead of weekly, they were spending around $10,000-$20,000 a week in salary advances. Their payroll system couldn’t keep up with the high turnover rate of their casual workforce, and there was no guarantee they would ever get that money back.

Something had to change.

“Our payroll was really painful to do… It was very cumbersome. There were a lot of mistakes happening, and it took too long to process. We had people who quit almost every other day, and we weren’t able to react to that in time for payroll.”

The Avanti Solution

All-in-one people and payroll management software

Daryl decided to go with Avanti because of how configurable their payroll and HR software was. He liked that Avanti would adapt to their business needs, rather than force them to run things in a certain way.

With help from the Avanti team, Daryl got the new payroll up and running, and he was immediately able to see the results.

What used to be a long, complicated process had become easy and automated. Avanti also helped United Safety change their payroll from semi-monthly to weekly, which helped reduce how many salary advances they needed to pay out.

Not only that, but their error rates went way down, which helped make employees happier, and boosted retention rates.

Daryl was so pleased with the results that he started leveraging the software in other areas of the business. Now, United Safety uses Avanti to handle their casual workforce, full-time workforce, HR, recruitment, and training.

Daryl says it’s a huge, important part of their business.

“Avanti helped us change our payroll for the casual workforce from the semi-monthly to a weekly payroll, which reduced the amount of salary advances we needed, so we saved on that. Our error rates went way down. The employees were happier, which created retention. And retention is hard in our industry.”

Super Results

Savings of over $250,000 each year

Since being implemented, Avanti has helped save United Safety time and money. According to Daryl, their HR department is easily 70% more efficient now than they were before.

It’s gotten to the point where they have just one person effectively managing the payroll of over 700 employees. Daryl says that would not have been possible without Avanti.

Without the software, Daryl says they would have had to hire an additional eight to ten data entry people to keep up with the payroll. That would have easily cost them at least $250,000 each year.

Now, whenever Daryl starts a partnership with a new software company, he uses United Safety’s relationship with Avanti - and the results they’ve seen together - as the model for how it should look.

“Avanti is a true business partner. I could say, without a doubt, that our competitors are not handling as much of a workforce, and not as effectively.”

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About the Author

Wes Quintin

Wes is the Marketing Manager at Avanti Software. As part of Avanti's amazing marketing team, he works to create marketing programs, experiences, and stories that drive results by educating Canadian Payroll and HR professionals on people management technology and best practices.

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