Parkview Home Uses Deputy to Eliminate Paperwork and Significantly Reduce Costs 

Parkview Home is a long-term care facility designed to meet the needs of seniors in Freeport, Illinois. They offer retirement living with a full continuum of care, including recreational and wellness facilities.

Lisa Young is the Controller responsible for researching and finalizing any software used to run their operations. Before Deputy, they were using another software for their scheduling. 

However, it did not integrate with their payroll or their time and attendance system. 

Lisa recalls having to station a laptop in their break room so that staff could clock in and out of their shifts. Further, she would have to download the data to a USB drive and print the timesheets to get them approved in person.

Her entire process was painstaking and at risk for human error. From calculating time off and shift differentials to submitting everything to a separate CPA tool that created checks and tax documents – everything was done by hand. She knew the system they were using wouldn’t allow them to grow and scale the business the way they wanted to.

Only the nursing staff utilized the old software at the time, while the rest were still scheduling on paper. Lisa notes, “...they paid a fair amount for the use over that time,” yet she still found herself chasing down paper schedules. 

To make matters worse, their previous software only provided reporting in an inconvenient PDF format, which made data analysis cumbersome. Lisa shared that an extra fee was required to receive the same data in a usable Excel spreadsheet.

“[Our old software] provided us every pay period on PDF. You had to pay an extra fee to get it in an Excel format. You couldn't export any of the reports yourself. Doing any analytics with the payroll data was time-consuming, [an] extra cost, and problematic.”

Lisa also found it inconvenient that the software did not have an integration with BambooHR, their payroll provider of choice. That’s when they decided to try out Deputy, which integrates seamlessly with BambooHR.

“[Our old software] offered an integration, but you didn't have the same kind of control. Parkview overall was doing a lot of the reporting on paper.”

Lisa says that “going from a total paper situation to being able to get data you needed quickly” was one of the key requirements she had in mind when looking for a better solution. She wanted to find a solution that would help them automate processes like onboarding as well.

“If you don't have some kind of system that keeps you honest when you onboard a new employee if you've got paper documents…maybe you'll miss giving them the ability to accrue PTO. Maybe you'll miss their anniversary dates. We needed something that was gonna automate a lot of those practices and procedures for us so that we didn't have to constantly be chasing spreadsheets for 10 million different things on one person.”

While researching software solutions, Lisa turned to BambooHR and saw that they had a few timekeeping platform recommendations. 

“[BambooHR] showed us quite a spectrum [of time-keeping platforms]. When you're looking at a workforce of 100, we need a lot of different things. It was the features that Deputy offered and the price point that made us finalize our decision.”

“When we combine the price of Deputy with BambooHR, it put us in a pretty good point in comparison with the [previous] provider that we were utilizing.”

Lisa found it easy and seamless to get Deputy set up and running for the team.

“Setting up our employees on Deputy was absolutely painless because we provided all of our data to BambooHR. And because of the integration, it back fed all of that information into Deputy. So then all I had to do was go and add the training.”

During their implementation, whenever they had questions or issues, they had no trouble and “got responses very rapidly.” Even early on after training, she heard great feedback from the team that Deputy was making a huge difference.

Lisa notes, “For those managers that are scheduling and especially those that were using paper before, they were surprised at how quickly they were able to learn Deputy.”

Beyond onboarding, there’s now a great deal of flexibility and autonomy within the scheduling process. Lisa shared that employees are more engaged and even use the Shift Pulse feature to reflect and share feedback on their shifts.

“[Managers] like the idea that they can schedule a whole month at a time [in Deputy]. So ease of scheduling is great. The ability to swap out employees, change schedules if there's a call out, or if somebody needs a PTO and the manager decides to switch up the schedule, that's very easy for them. Our employees are using the little reactions when they clock out at the end of the day.”

Lisa notes that reporting is no longer a source of frustration and that Deputy has enabled them to do everything they need to do. 

“[Deputy’s] reporting features have made certain things very easy for us. I can export a report for the two-week time period and easily input and calculate those shift differentials and weekend differentials.”

Care facilities like Parkview Home consider their staff to be an essential element of their operations “machine.” Lisa notes that Deputy has enabled this machine to run smoothly and help them deliver quality care.

“We're not making a product. We're delivering care. So having our residents happy with the level of staffing is the key element.”

Deputy is helping Parkview Home toward their long-term goal of eliminating the dependency on expensive agency staffing, which will help streamline operations and “tremendously reduce” costs. Deputy makes it so much easier for their existing staff to claim empty shifts — and for managers to find available staff with the push of a button.

“Deputy allows [our nursing staff] to see very quickly if a shift is open, and they can pick it up.

Since implementing Deputy, Lisa estimates that they are saving almost 7 hours every week across various administrative tasks, including calculating payroll, shift differentials, and scheduling.

Reflecting on how Deputy has changed the way Parkview runs, Lisa says, “The ability to eliminate paper tracking makes Deputy a wonderful system.”