IBEX

"The time savings are immeasurable."

Situation

Park Theatre and Movie Café, located on South Osborne Street in Winnipeg’s picturesque Riverview community, is a privately-owned, multi-purpose venue that offers a specialty coffee boutique, movie rentals and a theatre that is host to independent movie screenings, CD release parties, live acts and is available for private function bookings.

With a full complement of 10 part-time staff members, Erick Casselman, part-owner of Park Theatre, has been an IBEX iPayrollHR customer since August 2005 and in the spring of 2007 Erick upgraded to iPayrollHR/iSchedule Edition.

Problem

Previous to Erick becoming an iSchedule user, he found that getting ready to submit his payroll for processing was “chaotic” and was a task he had difficulty fitting into his schedule with the myriad other responsibilities as part-owner of a small business. He often had inaccurate reporting of hours which, understandably, frustrated his employees; was guessing the number of hours to report for each employee because he had no formal way of tracking that information; and had no way of budgeting his payroll accurately.

Solution

Because of its long-standing working relationship with Erick, the IBEX Herd knew he would benefit from iSchedule, a new web-based scheduling program that, unlike many other programs and services, completely integrates time and attendance and payroll. Since signing up for a 30-day free trial, and subsequently becoming an iSchedule client, Erick says iSchedule saves a “tremendous amount of time at the management level.”

By using the Actual Hours feature of the program, Erick no longer has to guess at how many hours his employees have worked in a week. Instead, he logs into iSchedule – from his home, the office or anywhere else for that matter – and simply makes adjustments for any changes to the schedule from the previous day or days. iSchedule automatically coordinates that information with his payroll.

Being able to set up a scheduling template allows him to budget his labour hours by the week, month, year or season and once he has created a schedule he can choose to automatically e-mail it to his employees when schedules are available online. The online accessibility of iSchedule means his employees can access current and future schedules from home or school and they can provide updates, or make changes, to their availability.

The messaging application means Erick can send communications to his staff with a forced-read feature, increasing communications with his staff. It also allows staff to check when their coworkers are available to switch shifts and who’s looking to book a day off at the last minute.
“It provides ease of scheduling and editing, is very streamlined, doesn’t take a long time to do and there’s lots of flexibility,” Erick says of iSchedule.

Evaluation

“It’s absolutely the best scheduling software I’ve ever seen,” says Erick who, before investing in Park Theatre and Movie Café, was a scheduling manager at a local health facility where he employed a variety of different programs to schedule a large number of staff in a high-paced environment. “I really like how it coordinates with my payroll,” says Erick.

Since signing up for iSchedule, Erick’s payroll is accurate and he has dramatically reduced the amount of time spent scheduling staff and budgeting labour. Now, instead of spending so much time on tasks such as scheduling and preparing his payroll, he has more time to focus his energy on other opportunities at “the Park.”