Optometric Care Associates is an eye care practice and spectacles retail business

Kate Gillenwater is the corporate manager for Optometric Care Associates, an eye care practice and spectacles retail business that has two locations nestled in the beautiful winery and coastal region of Central California.

Paso Robles is known for its hot springs, its abundance of wineries, and olive oil, and almond orchards. Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the 30,000 strong townships is located where the region of Central California ends. A forty-five-minute drive to the ocean will take you to Los Osos, a pretty town located along the Pacific coast of San Luis Obispo County.

Gillenwater runs the operations of both offices in those townships and has worked at Optometric Care Associates for over ten years. The company, which sells eyewear and performs comprehensive eye care, is headed by four doctors and has fourteen staff in total. Founded in the seventies, the business gets most of its customers via referrals as its known for its high-quality service and professionalism.

Gillenwater manages the retail staff, the back-office technicians, does the book-keeping and payroll, supervises the timesheets, and makes sure the doctors are kept “on task.” Every day brings unique challenges, as the eyewear retail operation and eyecare business yields a steady flow of patients, each with their own unique requirements.

The business is always busy as people may drop in to purchase new eyewear or to attend their annual eye examination. Therefore, the staff at Optometric Care Associates need to be attentive, precise, and on top of their schedules and tasks.

Gillenwater’s daily duties were increasing, and she was now taking responsibility for tasks that were formerly carried out by three people. Management of the company’s payroll system was becoming a headache, and stealing time from her social life.

Gillenwater had to drive from her home in Pablo Roses to Los Osos to pick up the payroll sheets, traveling outside of office hours, to get the documents in order to pay the staff. That logistical nightmare and the 45-minute drive was eating into her valuable personal time, and creating work stress.

“That was a real pain in the neck,” Gillenwater said. “I had to strategically plan my shift and get to the Los Osos office in the morning in order to process the payroll there, and then drive back to our head office in Paso Robles to finalize payroll.”

Gillenwater knew a better system to manage her administrative tasks had to exist. In June, she attended a job fair in her area and met people from ZenPayroll. She liked the software, but she was also looking for an easy web-based timesheet system that could also help her automate that task. She had been using a free time-sheet management system discovered on the Internet, but it had limited functions.

Shortly afterward, ZenPayroll made contact with her, to inform her they were now integrated with a software platform, Deputy. After signing up to Deputy and using its web-based scheduling, time and attendance, and payroll functions, Gillenwater has freed up her time considerably.

“When I found ZenPayroll and Deputy, it was an answered prayer.” Gillenwater said. Deputy also enabled Gillenwater to automate an important part of the payroll process, working out how to accurately pay staff for their over-time.

“I was having to get my calculator out and manually calculate the overtime rates when processing the payroll,” Gillenwater said. “Deputy transfers all of that data at the click of a button, so it’s a very convenient solution.” She can also log into Deputy and view the payroll data from home, or via her mobile device.

The payroll batch is done every two weeks. It’s now a matter of a few clicks to process the fortnightly salary run.

“I can log in to Deputy, jump into the approved screen, and then I process the payroll and let the batch go,” Gillenwater said. “All it takes is three or four clicks on the computer.”

Her staff are also sold on the Deputy platform as they can clock in and out via their smartphones, which means all of the rostering is done smoothly.

Gillenwater can also keep track of staff and see who has arrived to start a shift, who is late, and who is yet to turn up. Furthermore, staff are using the messaging component of Deputy to communicate with one another.

“They can see their roster on their smartphone, using Deputy,” Gillenwater said. “The staff can communicate with each other and send out messages, which means I don’t have to send out a staff memo around the office about a particular issue.”

“Deputy has freed up my time tremendously”, said Gillenwater. “It just takes a few minutes now to undertake all my administrative tasks and the amount of time I have saved is just mind-blowing. I guess I was a little skeptical at first but Deputy has been perfect for me.”