From Aberdeen to St Ives, and with a head office at their practice in Slough, Smile Care Ltd provide NHS and private dentistry services at 32 practices across the UK. They pride themselves on offering patients a choice between NHS dentistry and affordable private care, with individually crafted treatment plans — their philosophy is to treat their patients as individuals, not numbers.

The challenge

In early 2019, Smile Care Ltd. began the search for a clocking in & out system that could handle time data centrally, to replace the disparate, less reliable systems each of the sites had used previously.

Time data was often available inconsistently, with managers having to fill in timesheets based on memory if staff didn’t clock in themselves.There were also instances of staff clocking in for each other.

But overall, consistency was the main problem for payroll, with data often sent across in different formats by each of the sites.

Registered Manager Maryrose Simpson was tasked with finding a software package that could solve these problems, and implement it across the entire business.

“Our payroll team needed to get the same information for all of the practices at the same time, in the same format,” she explained.

The team previously used a combination of spreadsheets, basic timesheet software, and WhatsApp messages to plan & distribute rotas, and record hours worked.

The solution

Mary Rose contacted a few software providers initially, but it was only RotaCloud that she trialled. Given the complexity of Smile Care Ltd., the team opted for a long trial and implementation process which initially didn’t involve most staff at all. Instead, the team ran RotaCloud and its Time & Attendance add-on in parallel with their existing system, until they were convinced by RotaCloud’s features and accuracy, and the staff had familiarised themselves with it, too.

The roll-out gradually expanded to all practices and all roles, providing the payroll team with full visibility over hours worked.

“I can check and agree the hours weekly, and sign them off weekly, whereas before I was reliant on staff telling me what they’d done,” Maryrose told us. “So the accuracy is much better, the speed of doing it is much better, there are fewer arguments about who worked when. It’s much quicker to do [payroll] at the end of the month, because you’ve got it all there — 32 locations worth of data in the same format.”

The team also benefited from RotaCloud’s integration with their HR software. “Annual leave and days off feeds in from PeopleHR,” Maryrose told us. “Once annual leave is booked it shows on the rota.”

Finally, we asked: ‘Is RotaCloud worth it?’

“It is!” Maryrose explained. “Because of the accuracy [of the time data]. We know staff have to be in the building to [clock-in], and it’s all automated in RotaCloud.”

We’re delighted that the Smile Care Ltd. team have found RotaCloud’s Time & Attendance add-on so useful for accurate, reliable and efficient payroll. RotaCloud’s good for more than just rotas!