Brazen Clothing

Brazen is an award winning screen printing and wholesale clothing business based in Wellington. Established in 1994, from simple beginnings with one machine, these days they are one of the largest screen printing facilities in New Zealand, with clients including Garage Project, Havana Coffee, L’affare and The Black Seeds.

With 17 full time, part time and casual staff, Manager Paul Newson used to dread pay day.

“Thursday was always a day of huge pressure for me. I’d spend way too much time collecting everyone’s timesheets, adding them up and manually entering them into my old desktop payroll system.”

The downsides of paper timesheets

A big part of the problem was not knowing how accurately people were recording their hours. “We used a paper timesheet system. People would record their hours and lunch breaks on a slip of pink paper each day. On Thursday I’d tell the guys it was payroll time and the whole place would come to a complete stop while everyone pulled their timesheets together and filled out the ones they’d forgotten.

“I’d end up with a big pile of timesheets on my desk and I’d have to add up all the hours and try to figure out the decimal points. Every week we’d have a few people that had forgotten to enter their hours on a given day and they’d have to rack their brains trying to remember their hours and break times from several days earlier.

“As well as the whole process taking ages, I just had no idea of knowing whether the hours in the timesheets were right. And if someone was off sick on pay day and I couldn’t find their timesheets at their workstation I had no idea what to pay them.”

When he was happy that he had added up all the hours correctly, Paul had to manually enter them into his old payroll system. Being a desktop product, he had to use his work computer where the system was installed.

“I often work late and on pay day I’d finish work about 7 or 7:30pm and then have to spend another hour to an hour and a half at my desk running the payroll.”

“Moving to PayHero is one of the best things I’ve ever done for my company. I used to stress about payroll and timesheets because there were always issues. With PayHero I don’t even think about it. It’s easy.”

Moving online with PayHero

While searching for a better solution, Paul discovered PayHero. Paying his employees in now quick and simple, which Paul does by loading a pre-populated bank file from PayHero into his online banking. “I love the fact that it’s all online. These days I head home and do the wages with a glass of wine after dinner. The whole thing takes less than 10 minutes.”

“I love that it does all of the KiwiSaver, student loan and other calculations for me. This has freed up a lot of time and is a far less frustrating task. The way it can automatically calculate public holiday allowances is really cool and saves me a huge amount of time.”

Managing a screen printing business means Paul has an eye for design. “I love the clean look, it’s very polished. The information you want to see is easily accessible with minimal clicks back and forth.”

As Paul delved more into PayHero he decided to give the photo time clock a try as well.

“The photo time clock has been a revelation. I would highly recommend it to any business with shift workers. It creates a sense of fairness by accurately recording hours, so both the staff and the owner know they’re not being taken advantage of.”

Staff clock in and out of their shifts and their time entries automatically appear in PayHero ready for payroll. “There’s no more chasing up or wondering whether the timesheets are accurate. These days if someone is sick on payday I know exactly how much to pay them!”

Paul’s staff love how easy it is to see their leave balances and request leave on the employee mobile app. And as for Paul, “I can just look at the leave calendar and see an overview of who’s going to be away each week, which is really helpful.”

As well as making things much easier, there are some really tangible benefits for Brazen. “I would say that the time savings between me and my staff would be around 8 – 9 hours a week – far more than the cost of the subscription. Money aside, it’s worth every cent just for wage day being easy and quick rather than a dreaded day that had to be factored in each week.