Ingenia optimises payroll and rostering with HR uplift

Ingenia, an ASX-listed operator of holiday and residential communities, has spent the past two years optimising its HR and payroll processes after consolidating four previous systems into Dayforce.

(L-R) Rebecca Ford, Hayley Nuttall (both Ingenia), Dan Stewart (Magnisol).

The company implemented Dayforce in August 2023, in part due to the impending end-of-life of a pair of systems that included its payroll software Preceda.

Head of people and culture Hayley Nuttall said ingenia also wanted to enable frontline teams “to spend time with residents and guests” in its communities, by making it simpler to interact with HR systems.

“For us, it’s about how we take the complexity out of their roles and make their work life better,” Nuttall told the Dayforce Summit in Melbourne.

After evaluating both Dayforce and SuccessFactors, Ingenia asked its frontline teams for their preferences. 

“We got them to vote, confirm the features they liked, what’s going to make their work life better, so they were very much on the journey with us,” Nuttall said.

The company deployed Dayforce modules in stages, with assistance from Magnisol and other consultants.

It was deployed as a minimum viable product, after which the team went back to optimise the processes that the system supports.

“Because we implemented so quickly and went for a minimum viable product, a lot of our processes remained the same in terms of how we operated, and so we had the joy and the challenge post-go-live of getting feedback from people actually using the system [about where] our process is broken, and maybe it isn’t the right or most effective way to go about our operation,” HR systems lead Rebecca Ford said.

“I think the biggest challenge for us [now] is just continually evolving and getting everyone in our business used to things continually evolving.”

This challenge isn’t limited to the HR domain, Nuttall noted.

“Ingenia has grown really fast over the last few years, and we grew so fast we didn’t really keep up with our systems and processes,” she said.

“We needed to slow down a little bit to speed up, so there’s a lot of work going back into the business about all of our systems, processes [and] priorities. There’s a lot about system enhancements. 

“The good thing for us [in people and culture] is we’re quite far down the journey because we have a best-of-breed system in Dayforce, and we did the hard work a couple of years ago, but a lot of our other teams and support teams are catching up now and doing that work.”

With Dayforce bedded down, payroll is running much more smoothly, with payments able to be made eight hours earlier than when using the previous system Preceda.

Preceda was not integrated with any other HR system, requiring duplicate data entry and effort between systems and spreadsheets. 

“The person processing payroll is so different [now],” Nuttall said.

“Before, they were [doing] data entry, [whereas] now they’re very much compliance and checking, and it’s a very different skillset.”

The company ran the old and new systems side-by-side for the first year.

During user acceptance testing of the Dayforce system, a number of “historical skeletons” were uncovered with payments not matching up.

“The problem was in Preceda - Dayforce was calculating [pay] correctly,” Nuttall said.

“We have just finished cleaning up our historical skeletons two years later. We have had a really big push because we wanted everything closed out before the end of [this] financial year because we want a clean slate next year. 

“That has been a lot more work than we were ever expecting, [but] the big thing for us now is how accurate our payroll is.”

Another benefit is that in the company’s holiday parks operation, Dayforce makes it easier to manage staff costs in line with tourist demand.

“In a tourism business, we need to respond if we don’t require to have that many staff on - there are levers we should be pulling to bring our wages cost down, but [previously] we didn’t have the data until six weeks later, [so] we would be over-rostering and not adjusting well enough,” Nuttall said.

“Now, we have a dashboard through an integration with Power BI so [the holiday park leaders] get the dashboard the day after the shift is completed, so they can see what’s happening with their payroll on a monthly basis and on a daily basis as well.”