2006-11-20 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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included the core financial information, general ledger, accounts payable, and purchasing components. This has been in place for two and a half years and has been working very well. One of the efficiencies of the system is that they are able to collect and report more information than before, which of course requires that more information be input into the system. In that sense, there is some increase in work for the employees that used to stamp and date various documents which ran around the County. Reports were all on paper and data was monthly, and if you wanted to know what happened, you had to look up each monthly report. Ms. Crawford said there has been a shift in what employees do. The amount of time employees spend typing and paper pushing has not changed very much, but the result is that the information is more widely available and quicker to access for those doing research. The Payroll and Human Resources systems for the County were never computerized. It was 100% paperwork. It mostly worked, but had many limitations. Now it has been customized for the in -house staff. She said it is important for control purposes to have the whole Human Resources package computerized and tied in with personnel information. Human Resources needs to have all information input before an employee can get a paycheck. They cannot fall behind and catch up another time, and this has resulted in overtime in some cases. Ultimately, everything has to done according to schedule for employees to be paid. When there is a change in pay rate or any other personnel change for an employee, that information has to be processed before the paycheck can be cut. Ms. Crawford said the time sheet entry itself changed a lot and was a bigger challenge than expected. The County has an incredibly complex payroll, and they did not want the payroll system to be reliant on a staff person who had written the program to handle it. They wanted it to be standardized and have upgraded software which would interface with the general ledger and accounting. About a dozen modules came with the system, and Human Resources and Payroll have a part. The impact on the departments has been that payroll data entry has increased. At the same time all this was happening, the County got new software with its own requirements. They also changed the way they report time. Before they could only report total hours for a pay period. All the information they had before FRESH was on the semi - monthly totals for a given employee, but it did not have a day -by -day breakdown. There are occasions when it is desirable to know exactly when an employee's overtime occurred, not just that ten hours of overtime were worked. The new system shows what type of overtime and when it occurred. In order to comply with the FLSA, it is important these requirements are met. Putting the time in daily instead of twice a month is a big leap. This is a change the County felt was needed and now finally has the ability to do. The changes impact not only the Finance Department but every department which enters payroll. However, there is a conversion period in getting used to a new system. The payroll change happened in August, 2005, so has only been in place a little over a year. Enhancements are being requested from vendor, and they are trying to sort out how to do things so as to increase the efficiency of the system and minimize the impact the change has had. She said there are many efficiencies with the new system, but not necessarily the same employees are enjoying those fruits. 5