Opened in 1971, the Silver Springs Golf & Country Club is only a 15-minute drive from downtown Calgary and offers “over 300 acres of rolling hills and valleys with dramatic elevation changes” for golfers of all abilities.
As Russel Ens, Controller and Accounting Manager at Silver Springs, shares: “We’re coming into our 50th year in 2021. I’ve been here for four seasons now, and I take care of all the payroll and HR.”
Russel’s wishlist for a new payroll solution? Efficient, cloud-based and simple to use.
“Archaic” is the word that Russell uses to describe the previous payroll system. “It didn’t have a lot of the new technology that’s come on the market recently. This meant a lot of manual processes that took a lot of time, especially in the summertime during the golf season, when we have over a hundred employees to pay regularly.”
“My goal was to minimize the work, the manual processes, and also minimize the chance for human error, which can happen when you’re printing multiple spreadsheets and keying back information into an application.”
“We looked at a number of different applications,” Russel recalls. “Some well-known, others that could integrate directly into our accounting software, some I hadn’t heard of. And then there was Rise, which was something I was looking for: a cloud-based application where, if I’m on the road or on vacation, I could still quickly and easily do payroll.”
Being able to run payroll from anywhere was invaluable at the start of COVID-19.
“We really never lost a beat when we were doing payroll during the high point of COVID, during the springtime and summertime. It was really seamless for our employees to get their pay, regardless of what was happening behind the curtain. It didn’t matter where I was when approving the pay run, at home, in the office, somewhere in-between, the employees had the same positive experience.”
Simplicity and accessibility, now par for the course
Before Rise, there was a lot of noise, as Russel puts it. “I’d have a lot of employees emailing me, asking me to reset their password because they’d forgotten it from last season. Now the paystub is in their inbox, the morning of pay, and everybody is paid on time and with minimal errors. So the staff love Rise.”
“The transition itself to Rise was very smooth. We had a run up to the live date of about three months, so we were able to do some side-by-side pay runs and then when we hit day one with Rise, we were ready to go.”
“And you know,” Russel continues, “we had such a painless implementation, we're actually now moving over to the HR side and the time capture side as well. We'll be implementing that in the next couple of weeks. It's great to have that comfort level of one piece of software, and then being able to move with other pieces and just implement that seamlessly.”
The support behind the application is what counts.
When asked what advice he’d give to a company looking to switch payroll providers, Russel shares: “Do your research first. Reach out to your contacts. See what you know and don’t know. If you haven’t looked in a while, there’s a lot of new technology and you don’t want to be stuck again with old technology.”
As Russel plainly puts it: “A lot of applications out there do the same thing. They process your payroll, they pay the employees and away you go.”
“So one thing I'd look at, rather than just the application, is the support behind the application. That’s what counts. The level of support we’ve gotten from Rise has been amazing. So whatever application you’re looking at, do they have a support team that will get you out of a jam or answer questions in a pinch? Because a lot of times when you're doing payroll, you do have those time constraints and cut-offs. If you're stuck struggling, and you can't get your payroll done, it's probably just as bad as having errors in it. But if you have a company like Rise, you don’t worry about those things.”
