The Challenge

When Northshore Christian Academy (NCA) started out, it was still small enough to handle payroll and human resource  (HR) functions internally. As enrollment grew, outsourcing some manual tasks made good sense.

 “Despite feeling relief from outsourcing our timekeeping, the provider’s solution had many shortcomings – expensive, clunky, not user-friendly, and most of all not designed for smaller organizations,” explains Sherry Brown, Human Resources Manager.

NCA was not satisfied with the cost or service level of that provider they so tried another system, which worked fine for electronic time cards, but their internal payroll process continued to be laborious. Employees didn’t have any access to their payroll information, which increased the volume of inquiries.

“Our employee payroll had become so cumbersome that it took our team an unreasonable amount of time to process,” added Brown. “We knew we had definitely outgrown our internal processing capacity and that it was time to look for a more convenient, outsourced solution that would relieve our payroll team, fix all of these inefficiencies, and keep all of our functions in one place.”

The Solution

NCA happened to be working with a local HR consultant who understood the pain points well. In 2015, she recommended that NCA come up with a new specification for an outsourced solution. Their main objective was to go paperless for HR and payroll functions at an affordable cost. Hosted on one single cloud-based platform, PayNW was chosen in the selection process because of its attractive and holistic offering – pricing, features, effectiveness, and ease of use. Moreover, PayNorthwest’s platform could be used in tandem with the school’s existing Great Plains accounting system.

“After both solution demonstrations, we felt that PayNW was more our size and they just understood our unique payroll needs. Their team set up the payroll for us the right way and found a way to help us do things the way we are used to doing them, so our staff could experience a smooth transition after being trained on the new system,” Brown continued.

NCA processed its first payroll with PayNW in January 2016. They continue to issue all of the reporting NCA needs effortlessly from a single platform in a timely fashion, including W2s, 1099s, PTO, ACA reports, etc. PayNorthwest and Great Plains work hand in hand – everything is done electronically, saving valuable time and greatly improving accuracy. 

“Having access to everything online in one place in real time is not just beneficial for our staff,” adds Brown. “Each employee can now consult their HR file and change their personal information directly without involving our department, enabling us to spend our time on other important matters such as policies, recruiting teachers, etc.”