Magic Memories uses Deputy to manage wage costs across hundreds of sites, saves admin time with Deputy’s payroll and POS integrations

Magic Memories is all about making people smile: whether it’s capturing your “I can’t believe I’m doing this!” moment on a Shot Over jet or recording a young relative meeting a clownfish, it’s the personalised customer experience that matters.

Magic Memories’ on site teams at tourist attractions and events help visitors find the standout moments they’ll want to relive with friends and family. Those images are often curated and packaged into souvenirs such as photobooks, mugs and canvases.

Photo technologies have definitely come a long way since Magic Memories set up its first camera at the bottom of a gondola ride in Queenstown on New Zealand’s South Island.

Still, the key to Magic Memories’ success has always been its staff, says Lisa Le Roux, Group People & Culture Operations and Compliance Lead at Magic Memories:

“We have wonderful technology, but it’s really the people capturing and sharing memories that are the heart of our business.”

In 2014 Magic Memories celebrated twenty years of steady growth, with more than a thousand employees at around 100 locations – quite an achievement for a business started by two people with a camera and some creative ideas.

Yet some of its day-to-day management systems were as old as the business itself.

Workers’ hours and schedules were historically recorded on paper, reports Amy Johns, Commercial Operations and Analysis Manager. Every day the managers at each of the 100-plus locations around the world would manually update one spreadsheet per site with the hours each person worked, and another spreadsheet containing rosters for the days ahead. They’d then forward those sheets to HQ.

“We could see total hours but not always the details,” notes Amy. “Each worker had a daily sheet to write their start and finish times and breaks, then add up the hours, but when the data was transferred into a shared sheet for pay purposes by the managers it was open to human error.”

Likewise, the roster sheet for each site forwarded to HQ didn’t contain the most up-to-date information, because it simply recorded workers’ availability already reported to their managers.

“There wasn’t a lot of ability to pull things together on a global scale,” adds Lisa. “We had a collection of spreadsheets and human error could cost us a few hours per site per pay period, which could add up to a few thousand dollars across a couple hundred sites every quarter.”

Budgeting for part-time and casual workers’ hours is challenging for any business – even more so when you operate across multiple locations.

“Before Deputy you’d never know what a site was scheduling unless you asked them to photocopy it and send it through,” recalls Amy. “Now it’s online we can see it from anywhere. We can be more proactive about wage costs in each location and country: we can see if too many people are rostered on during quiet times of the day. It’s a real benefit for the bottom line.”

Every worker and manager now has a much clearer view of shifts: they get notifications on their smartphones about upcoming shifts, they can ‘clock on’ when they arrive (via smartphone or having their picture taken at a tablet kiosk) and they can request different hours using Deputy’s shift swapping feature.

As part of its Enterprise Plan, Magic Memories asked Deputy to create a few custom features, such as calculating commissions by tracking worker’s time and point-of-sale data against local targets, then exporting the data for approved commissions into the payroll system.

“The big thing for us with Deputy is having a universal platform integrating our core systems throughout the eight countries we operate in,” adds Lisa. “We’ve saved a day of admin per fortnight in Australia purely from Deputy’s ability to integrate with payroll – that’s worth approximately $11,000 per year. It’s a huge win for us. Now our payroll team is freed up from data entry they have more time to focus on higher value tasks that support retention and growth.”