The net ambition of any medical practice is to keep processes organized, efficient and effective. This is what workflow automation is all about: Having a way to do your job faster, easier and with reduced errors. Focusing on less paperwork when it comes to paying employees is a great way to start, we'd say. When you can eliminate employees clocking in for each other or save labour hours with a process that takes just a couple of clicks; this painful and expensive part of the workflow will just be a relic of the past. We know you’ve got better things to do than spend hours on your payroll. This is why medical practices in Australia and around the world, need more cloud-based software to make their payroll/ rostering & timesheeting more efficient.
Timesheeting
A complete cloud-based solution for timesheets, rostering, attendance and pay rate calculation is what will help your practice achieve substantial savings in resources. If you take the costs of external bookkeeping or accounting and compare them to simply installing a hardware time clock on your premises, which one would you choose? Here's what we mean. With this type of time clock, staff can just clock in and out of work using a 4-digit passcode and photo verification to reduce time and theft. Employees' time sheets generate automatically when the time clock synchs this data to a cloud server. How easy is that? You or your staff will just need to input data for employees once and the system will apply the proper rules for every pay run. This will give you an average saving of 4% on labour costs and make a 2 hour + process of payroll a simple 5 minute breeze!
Rostering
This has never been easier because you will have access to an online roster that helps with scheduling shifts while simultaneously calculating the costs. This helps you monitor the actual cost of your roster, as you build it, so you know which employee works best with your budget. Alerts will tell you if there is a problem with staff availability when you're building it, so you’re never caught out. You can then share the schedule with employees through email and SMS so everyone knows when they're working. You can also quickly filter and sort your roster by locations or teams so you will always know who’s working where.
Payroll
A cloud-based solution will link seamlessly with your payroll system to export the time sheet data. Flexible award interpreters also automate industry award rates for more accurate calculations. In this way, all the work is automatically done throughout the week and this information is available before the actual payday. You won't have to spend time manually accounting for holidays, overtime, pay for higher duties, split shifts, sick leave, custom agreements and much more, because it’s now as simple as downloading all the data directly to your payroll, accounting or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
These are just some of the ways this software solution will help streamline your processes and save you valuable time and money. We've found that, however, many practices need more automation but have a concern that updating their payroll processes would involve a big expense. Let us reassure you. Modern solutions are very low-cost; easy to use; and, will save you even more because there is less data entry. What this does is ultimately leave you and your staff with time to do what’s important – running your business. Another advantage you'll see besides the direct financial benefits is that automation:
- Lifts the clinic aesthetic: Investing in your front office means saving money later on. Once the patient is in your reception area, and you have streamlined the workflow, they notice this and feel more relaxed because of the better efficiency and preparedness which is a key principle of effective patient flow.
- Provides more organization: Automation doesn't mean specifically eliminating employees, it just means that you are replacing those manually intensive tasks with a machine which is a big time saver. In this way, staff can make better use of their clinical expertise.
- Gives you better data to manage the business: When you use technology to automate processes, this also gives you a wealth of data that you can use for performance improvement and optimization. Also, greater automation with medical records, order entry and decision support, reduces complications and costs.
- Makes your staff happy and appreciative: When you can start paying your staff within minutes instead of hours, those are surely happy days indeed! Overall improvement in your workflow also makes their job easier and gives them the efficiency they need to succeed.
For information about how you can increase medical practice efficiency by implementing workflow management software into your daily processes today, please contact us and learn more.
