Imagine, Act and Succeed cares for people with the likes of physical and learning disabilities, autism, and mental health difficulties - anyone in need of extra care - across Wigan, Oldham, Trafford, and Salford.

After operating for over 30 years, Imagine, Act and Succeed became a registered care charity in 2010. Now, the company has over 460 staff and supports clients across 85 locations, including clients’ homes, and has the core aim to give service users choices and control over their own lives.

The challenge

Imagine, Act and Succeed's previous system of managing rotas and payroll was outdated and cumbersome, presenting significant challenges.

Payroll officer Emma Hobbs shared that the charity’s managers used paper to create their own rotas, which, due to being monthly and for multiple locations often with 10-20 employees each, meant they were on large A3 pieces of paper. Once complete, photos of these were then sent on WhatsApp to staff.

“Everything before we got RotaCloud was done on paper. The rotas, the timesheets - everything was just on paper.”

This routine proved difficult when changes had to be made. Whether due to sicknesses or shift swaps, edits would be made on the paper rotas and sent back out. Emma would often help managers amend rotas and timesheets when changes became too frequent or if the managers simply didn’t have the time.

“Sometimes it would take them a couple of days to complete the rotas - and that’s just completing the rotas, not actually getting them sent out and any changes being made.”

Day to day, Emma collated information from the company’s timesheets, rotas, and annual leave records, to determine what people got paid at the end of the month. With such a responsibility, Emma needed to ensure that all the data she received is accurate… which was a significant challenge.

Emma highlighted the biggest problem she, and the company, faced with this manual process. “It’s not accurate. It’s sometimes not up to date. There’s problems with staff not seeing changes. Yeah, that was the biggest problem - the accuracy of it.

“When you're looking at a piece of paper and you're counting up hours on it, there's room for miscalculations and missing things off - and that did happen … We have over 460 staff, so it happened often, and there's just - there is no room for that anymore.”

Tasked with bringing Imagine, Act and Succeed into the ‘digital age’, Emma and her payroll colleagues took to Google to find a solution to their rotas, timesheets, and payroll challenges.

After months of Google searches, free trials and demos, and reading many reviews, Emma and her team found their match with RotaCloud.

The solution

“It was how easy it was to do. That was the deciding factor, really,” Emma said. “Just straight off the bat, there was nothing complex about it, nothing complicated. It was really simple and easy and we thought everybody would be able to do what it needed to do.”

RotaCloud has taken a lot of time off of creating rotas and sending them out. Now, managers can plan rotas months ahead - and far more efficiently.

“Some managers manage several locations, so they could have two or three rotas to do. They probably sit down for an hour or two at the computers to do those now, as opposed to a couple of days beforehand.”

But, for Emma and her world of payroll, RotaCloud has been (in her words) a godsend.

“Obviously my main concern, my main priority, is payroll and making that as accurate as I possibly can. Knowing that that information I'm getting is just there and it's correct. It can't not be correct. It's fantastic.

“The information is accessible to us in payroll straight away, which is an absolute godsend. Being able to see instantly where someone is working, what shift they've actually done, the clock in and clock out records are just - it's made our payroll side so much more streamlined to what it was beforehand.”

The accuracy is the biggest benefit for Emma and her team in payroll, and the rest of staff would agree. Everybody working from the same page, being able to instantly see what everyone else is doing and where they are, has greatly improved communication. Having everything at their fingertips has made staff’s lives much easier and saved so much of managers’ time.

Emma compared their old process to their new one. “Prior to RotaCloud, the managers collected paper timesheets from the staff and they then had to calculate the hours and give them to us, which, again, was on a piece of paper. Now we can go into the system ourselves and pull that information in seconds. There's no chasing people for paperwork. There's no waiting until the very last minute to be able to run payroll because the information's there and I can access it.

“We've actually got to a point now where for the last few months we're running a monthly payroll that has zero errors on it whatsoever, which is absolutely amazing for me.”

While Emma doesn’t work directly with CQC, she has been told by management that RotaCloud has made inspections much easier for them: “Being able to access the reports, the information that's needed so quickly, and pull it down in whatever format that CQC wants” has made a world of difference.

When there are staff who have worked for a company since its beginning, accepting new ways to do things - especially tech - will always be a process. In Imagine, Act and Succeed’s case, some managers have been there for 30 years - and, needless to say, there was some reluctance.

However, some training sessions later and implementing location-specific clocking in terminals - for those without smartphones - quickly turned the tide.

“All the managers have commented that this (RotaCloud) has made everything, once they got used to it, so much quicker and easier to do because it's just all there at your fingertips.

“Everybody has said how much it's improved everything for them, from rotas to timesheets to recording annual leave. Everybody's commented on how much easier it's made those jobs to do. Now they're used to it and they understand how it works and why it's good for the company. They're all happy with it.”

When asked about her favourite thing about RotaCloud, Emma said: “I think how easy it is to use is the biggest thing. It's just so simple. Anybody can use it.”

Emma has attended many of the RotaCloud demos and webinars, and has even signed some managers up to training sessions. ​​“I try to do as many as I can because you never know what you're going to learn that you've not seen already.”

But she had much to say about the Customer Success Team.

“I think a massive thing for me is how amazing all the support staff, all the staff at RotaCloud, are. Every time I've got a question, I've got an answer back generally within minutes.” From the live chat to the openness to suggestions, Emma said that “the support we've got from RotaCloud is just unbelievable. It's been fantastic.”

“We all love RotaCloud, honestly. We wouldn't be without it now. The way it's helped the entire company is unbelievable.”