Kingdom Projects uses Deputy's mobile technology to manage the labour involved in construction projects.

Founded in 2008, and based in Queen Street Melbourne, Victoria, Kingdom Projects is a commercial construction company that offers a full suite of construction services. While the company is involved in the continual roll out of new Hungry Jacks stores nationwide, and specialises in retail construction and fit outs, Kingdom Projects is also heavily involved in large-scale construction projects across a broad range of sectors. Including commercial office construction, complex refurbishment and reconstruction works up and down the east coast of Australia.

As the business expanded, founding partner, Sean O’Connor found himself spending increasingly more of his time on paperwork, handling compliance and business admin. Already using his mobile device to run aspects of his business, O’Connor was keen to use mobile technology to manage the people side of his projects which involve a high level of coordination among contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and more. In addition, O’Connor also wanted to reduce or eliminate the time and money he and the business spent on administration and paperwork. While O’Connor was managing to keep on top of labour costs, and all the payroll paperwork and HR processes, he became increasingly concerned that it was only a matter of time before something slipped through the net. So he discussed his challenges with his accountant who recommended he speak to TradiePad , a consulting business, that helps trades-based businesses move their office from pen and paper to the cloud.

At an initial scoping session with Clinton Cowin, Managing Director at TradiePad, O’Connor explained: “As a construction company, our project managers and engineers are running multiple projects at the same time across multiple sites. We’re always on site or traveling, and only rarely are we all in the same place at the same time. Using manual systems was becoming onerous in terms of keeping a record of workers, checking availability of staff at specific times, and processing the payroll. The real-time tracking of hours against jobs was pretty much impossible. We’d negotiated an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement with our staff of around 20 workers which had made payroll highly complex and time-consuming. Just getting the pays right every week was becoming a full-time job.It had become such a headache, and was taking up time that I should have been spending building the business.”

Recognising Kingdom Project’s primary concerns, Cowin identified a number of ways that O’Connor could significantly reduce paperwork and the time he spent on admin tasks. This solution involved using Deputy for employee management, shift scheduling and payroll automation, and job management software WorkflowMax for job, time and invoice management, and Xero for payroll. Cowin showed O’Connor that with the integration of these platforms, he could feed his time and attendance data from Deputy straight into WorkflowMax and Xero to speed up invoicing and payroll, O’Connor was impressed. So O’Connor set the team from TradiePad to work to implement Deputy and WorkflowMax and integrate the systems. TradiePad also conducted staff training with a mix of online and onsite sessions for admin staff, and group training for field staff.

In one simple move, O’Connor dramatically cut down on double-handling of data and thus reduced the errors and duplication. “O’Connor says, “All our employees now have Deputy on their phones and are using it primarily to log their hours which then feed into WorkflowMax. This means we can now instantly view and analyse labour costings against jobs. We’ve set up Deputy to automatically calculate pay and allowance or penalty rates based on our EBA. So all the hours logged in Deputy give us a 100% accurate view of labour costs.”

“So with WorkflowMax I no longer have to rely on educated guesses, I have all the exact labour data on jobs from Deputy at my fingertips and it’s helping me tightly control the business, and labour costs. The integration with Xero means that payroll processing in a breeze and takes us just minutes, not hours to complete each week. All hours logged in Deputy feed into Xero payroll which I approve with a tap. In fact, this has helped us cut out about 12 hours a week handling this sort of admin, which is saving the business close to $20,000 a year. For my office staff, this means no more reconciliation headaches. They can now devote more of their time to businesses building work which is far more satisfying than payroll admin.”

“Deputy’s News Feed is also proving to be very useful, again because our employees are very rarely in the same place at the same time. Now it’s easy to send out alerts and share important news and announcements with everyone, and we know that they can view the communication wherever they are on their mobile devices. But what I love most about Deputy and the integration with WorkflowMax and Xero is that it’s all paperless and I can now run my business on my iPad. This had an enormous impact on the efficiency, profitability, and professionalism of the business.”