What Your Construction Firm Needs in an Employee Portal March 25, 2014
Posted by carolhagen in Construction Industry - Software, payroll.Tags: construction accounting software, Employee Portal, Employee Portals, human resources, Human Resources Department, Payroll, Paystubs
add a comment
Employee Portals are a way for construction companies to provide a self-service to their employees, providing access to weekly pay stubs and W-2s. This is especially helpful around tax time and frees up many requests to your Human Resources Department. This eliminates the need to encrypt files that you email to your employees and addresses more than the weekly electronic paystub for employee’s using direct deposit. Let’s look at what your construction firm should look for in an employee portal.
Employee Portal Integration to Your Construction Accounting Software and Intranet
Forget imports and exports, jury-rigging two disparate systems. Your Employee Portal needs seamless integration that delivers an experience where you remain in control. If your employee changes their last name, address, and number of dependents in the employee portal, your HR department should receive a notification to validate and control when an update occurs to an employee record inside your construction accounting software. There should be no rekeying of any data, and the HR department should have options to update payroll records only, update HR records only or both automatically. This should include standard fields as well as all the custom user-defined fields you may want your employees to update.
There should be no need to configure users or SQL accounts if it’s all tied right into your existing Employee Master. If your construction firm has an existing Intranet, you’ll want a solution that also has a web service API.
Portal Access on Smartphones, iPads and tablets
Web-based employee portals are great as your team can access their information from any computer. It’s just as important to offer access in the field for mobile devices. Make sure your employee portal has access on both smartphones and tablets. Your project superintendents and project managers will appreciate the effort and will find it invaluable when on the job site or commuting home from the project on the weekends.
Paperwork Should Flow
If your employee is changing their number of dependents, your portal should generate an email to that employee with the appropriate forms and instructions attached(W-4, etc). Automating forms distribution and notifications can then tie back to the Payroll or HR records. This also applies to Paid Time Off (PTO). Employees should have access to when they have used their PTO including vacation, sick and holiday time. There should also be an automated procedure for them to electronically request time off. Employee requests that require forms streamline the approval process for the field and office. Let your portal improve your employee relations and reduce the mundane tasks in your HR or payroll departments simultaneously.
Ok, by now you’re wondering where can you find such a solution. Since becoming a Viewpoint Business Development Partner I’ve kept abreast of each new software development partner and Keystyle Data Solutions caught my eye. Reach out directly to the Founder, Kevin Fisher (you can email him here) and tell him I sent you.
Arizona Construction Salary Survey Says… January 3, 2012
Posted by carolhagen in construction accounting software, Construction Industry - Software, linkedin, payroll.Tags: construction, hr, recruiting, salary survey, social media
add a comment
The Arizona Construction Salary Survey provides you with the employee compensation benchmarks for budgeting and data for best practices during your salary negotiations. The Construction Financial Management Association, Valley of the Sun Chapter is in the process of compiling the results of the December 2011 Arizona Construction Salary Survey. In this sneak peek of the talent employment development section of the survey, the social media recruiting sources while growing, are underutilized, by our survey participants.
My favorite question in the Salary Survey is “What are the primary sources your company uses to recruit new hires (check all that apply)?” While the same question was asked for Field, Office and Executive recruiting, the chart below displays the comparison of office and field recruiting sources:
Source: AZ Construction Salary Survey - CFMA VOS - Dec 2011
The actual reported LinkedIn recruiting usage in the survey were 8.7% for the field workers, 17.4% for office personnel and 12% for management and executives. While Monster, Craigslist and Jobing.com usage were more popular, the Arizona construction industry has begun to embrace some social media. Facebook and Twitter usage were almost non-existent, used by less than 4% of participants. While serving the construction industry, it is still surprising that when it comes to technology that we continue to lag behind other industries. Compare this with statistics from the 2011 Jobvite Survey where
“89% of U.S. companies will use Social Networks for Recruiting”
and you clearly see the disparity.
LinkedIn is the business executives and professional recruitment golden roledex. If your Human Resources Department didn’t realize it, your professional recruiting firm does. As Jobvite has reported, “2/3 of Companies have Hired Successfully using Social Networks”. This is why I blog and teach contractors about LinkedIn, social tools and technology, because there’s a bottom line business value, and it’s not just in recruiting employees.
For those that participated in the Arizona Construction Salary Survey, the full results will be sent to you via email in January 2012. The 2011 Survey is available for purchase for $100 (2009 Survey is available for $50). Request your copy via Email.
If you are looking for ways to better Leverage LinkedIn or have successfully recruited field, office or management positions in the construction industry on social networks, please let us know in the comments. Lastly, please share this with your business connections so they can benefit too.
Construction Payment Innovation August 12, 2010
Posted by carolhagen in Accounts Payable, Construction Industry - Software, equipment expense, Equipment Tracking, payroll.Tags: accounts payable, construction, disbursements, payment, Payroll
1 comment so far
Construction payment disbursements for payroll, travel, fuel, and entertainment purchases are accounting tasks in every construction firm. A mountain of receipts with handwritten notes arrive in the office, perhaps with a spreadsheet the employee has prepared itemizing the details. There is an alternative that streamlines this process, has built-in exception reporting and makes reconciliations a breeze. The construction industry is always looking for ways to control expenses while improving efficiencies and I happened to meet Betsy Berlin, Regional Sales Manager from Comdata who believes they have an appealing family of solutions for contractors.
Comdata MasterCard Program for Construction combines fleet, purchasing, and travel and entertainment into a payment solution allowing you to take control of your corporate spending. Their Comdata Virtual Payment MasterCard electronically generates a unique account number for each vendor payable to provide settlement data and automates reconciliation with integration to popular financial systems including: ComputerEase, Dexter + Chaney, Timberline, JD Edwards and others. If you’re trying to figure out how much that will save you in administrative costs, it costs $1.51 to produce an AP Check. Finally the Comdata Paycard solution eliminates the distribution of weekly payroll checks and you can administer card funding just like direct deposit.
There are a few things that impressed me about these solutions and the company.
This last item is a big deal as I know many businesses that nickel & dime you to death with even minor changes to reports. It also reflects on their focus and dedication to their customer.
How do I know that they’re the real deal? As of August 1st, Comdata is an official affinity partner with the Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA). For all current and future Comdata customers that belong to your local CFMA chapter, Comdata will contribute one basis point back to your chapter on all associated transactional spend with Comdata from those contractors. For those of you in Phoenix, Betsy plans to attend the CFMA luncheon on August 19th and is interested in meeting members that want to help their company and the CFMA Valley of the Sun Chapter as well. I’d be happy to introduce you.
Anyone already using their services? Please share your experiences with my readers by adding a comment. Thanks.
Carol's Construction Technology Blog 