Case Study: Increase Efficiency of In-House Payroll and Invoicing of Hours

HomeExchange.com’s mission is to connect like-minded travelers, help them travel anywhere, live like locals, and stay for free.  The company was started by home exchange pioneer Ed Kushins in 1992 as a printed, mailed book. Since then, HomeExchange.com has had more than 1 million exchanges in over 150 countries.

Problem: Manually Entering Hours into Payroll

HomeExchange.com is based in the U.S., and all employees are remote workers who are paid every two weeks. Before implementing stratustime, employees were emailing their hours as a spreadsheet.

Kushins himself would have to comb through his inbox, find the emails, download and open the attachments, and then manually enter the hours into the company’s payroll program. That is no way for a business pioneer to be spending his time.

Solution: stratustime Makes Payroll Processing Easier

Kushins moved all time and attendance reporting onto stratustime, and now all employees use the web browser version to clock in and clock out.

“Now with stratustime I have a single point for collection of hours. I push a couple of buttons, and all of the hours seamlessly integrate into SurePayroll,” said Kushins. “We found a tremendous boost to productivity and efficiencies … stratustime has made my life much easier.”

Meanwhile, ‘Across the Pond’ in Europe …

As we travel across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, we find Rayon Vert, HomeExchange.com’s marketing company. Essentially, Rayon Vert is a “captive” agency, with HomeExchange.com as their largest client managing 50 remote independent contractors who are distributed across Europe.

Problem: No Centralized System for Hours Collection

Each contractor had a different way of submitting hours via email.

“There was no way to look at the hours month-to-month. We had no control at all,” said Kushins. So he introduced Rayon Vert to stratustime as a solution for a more efficient collection of hours.

Solution: stratustime Provides Overview of Hours by Function

The geographically dispersed independent contractors clock in and out using the web browser version of stratustime. Rather than using time collection for payroll, Rayon Vert uses stratustime for the generation of invoices.

“It has made hour collection more efficient. And at that size, the simplicity and the unification of invoices has been good,” Kushins added.

Working with the implementation team at nettime solutions, Rayon Vert and HomeExchange.com customized their labor level category fields by function, such as Administrative, Translation, Customer Service, and Press. Now Kushins can review the hours spent across functions, either as a group or individual, and he can also compare country by country.

One of the side benefits of stratustime has been increased accountability.

“We have found that once the team started clocking in and out via the browser, the total number of hours reported has gone down. It has made them more accurate,” said Kushins.” stratustime has been a management tool that has been really, really effective for us.”

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