Varicon’s Timesheet and Payroll Automation Helped Collective Civil Reduce Payroll Admin Time by Over 50%

A family business having just been handed down a generation, Collective Civil is a civil construction contractor who has enjoyed success and growth over the last two decades. To continue this success they knew they needed to streamline their cost management and accurately track their cash flows to combat narrowing margins and increased competition.

We spoke with Troy Hanepen, son of founder Robert Hanepin, who was tasked with taking over the business and implementing the best-in-industry systems to stay ahead of the competition. Amongst the several facets of the business Troy wanted to address, he knew he had to prioritise and begin with the elements at the heart of his business’s health – cash flow visibility and operating efficiency.

The first challenge to address was easily capturing timesheets and payroll data from the field, transferring this information back to the office efficiently andprocessing it accurately. Troy, as all Directors, has enough on his plate running the business. “The time I used to spend manually sorting through our payroll data was killing me, taking me away from other tasks that were mounting. There just wasn’t enough time in the day, but my guys need to get paid.” 

“Our process for capturing timesheets with physical sheets of paper, bringing these into the office in piles and entering the information into excel was a headache, but we didn’t know there was another way,” noted Troy. Their site teams were busy concentrating on the job at hand and found the process of doing everything manually took away from their focus.

Troy’s challenges plague tens-of-thousands of civil construction sites every day around Australia.

Luckily, Varicon was designed and created to directly solve this problem, amongst a host of other cost management challenges specific to civil construction. Within a matter of weeks, timesheets and payroll data (including allowances, RDO’s, daily machinery assignments and more) was being captured simply and digitally from the site, eliminating the manual data entry in the office and eradicating the potential for human error.

With their customised pay rules – set up back of house by our Varicon team – Troy could “set and forget”, knowing that their data would be captured easily, calculated accurately and administered effectively.

“Varicon has already paid for itself…we’re already in the bonus” after just a couple of months.

Troy reported significantly increased efficiency with “admin time conservatively reduced by 50%”. He also cited the relief after eliminating a source of stress, thanks to the in-built governance layers within Varicon which ensure data cannot be accessed or tampered with under any circumstances.

His team reported higher levels of staff satisfaction due to the ease of data capture, reduced burden on them, and increased confidence in being paid accurately every week.

Collective Civil have enjoyed significant improvement after using just one of Varicon’s modules to its full extent, and look forward to streamlining their workflows even further.