Making the move from paper to digital rostering and payroll.

How SLR Care Homes made the move from paper to digital rostering and payroll.

Denver is one of the directors of SLR Care, a care home operator based in Kent. We caught up with him to talk about his move to Syncurio.

The challenge

When Denver and his co-director acquired their first care home, its operations were largely reliant on manual processes and paper. 

Staff schedules were managed on A3 sheets, with managers hand-drawing lines and filling shifts. Timesheets were paper-based, leading to frequent errors due to illegible handwriting. 

The team were incredibly dedicated, often staying beyond their shifts to care for residents in palliative care, but accurately capturing these hours proved an additional challenge. 

“Care is 24/7. Everything you do, you want to ensure you’re delivering the best care possible. But every month around payroll time, I’d receive multiple queries from staff reporting discrepancies – often small amounts like 20-30 minutes. While these may seem minor, getting it right was incredibly important. But once we’ve resolved one issue, other challenges would occur.

It wasn’t until we expanded to our third location, these challenges multiplied. Without proper logging systems, payroll costs became inconsistent. Holiday management provided additional challenges because the usual way of recording information in the paper diary led to disputes over balances and entitlements”.  – Denver

The administrative burden was huge.  

Denver would spend at least three full days just trying to work out payroll between their cut off dates. And this was going on on top of everything else we needed to keep the homes running smoothly and deliver the best level of care.

It all changed when SLR Care Homes saw rapid growth, going from 24 people to over 110 staff across three homes.

Exploring the right solution for this 3-home care group

Denver started looking into digital solutions to help make the process that little bit easier.

Whilst he was initially hesitant about changing – “you get so used to pen and paper you think you can grin and bear it” – he quickly realised that it was a now or never situation. Following a recommendation, he was introduced to Syncurio and signed up.

Results

“The ease of doing payroll at the end of the month, ease of managing holidays, and knowing who’s actually in the building, for me, that’s where the real value in Syncurio is. 

Syncurio makes care home operations easier.

Time savings just on the payroll alone have been impressive.

Before, it was taking Denver 12-13 hours over 2-3 days a month. After going digital, he spends just 30 mins.

“My team knows where they stand. There’s no longer a discrepancy about how much holiday they’ve taken, how much they were entitled to, and how much they’ve been paid for it. The process of going backwards and forwards every month has gone, leaving us to continue to focus on the important thing: delivering care”.