City eyes computerizing its payroll

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The city of Delaware is looking at purchasing software to record employee attendance and hours worked.

Currently, city employees have to hand-write the times they work on a yellow card, said Mayor Carolyn Kay Riggle.

“It’s an obvious thing that you would have in the 21st century,” said City Council member Andrew Brush.

“It’s an issue we’ve been looking at for quite some time,” said city Finance Director Dean Stelzer during a finance committee meeting on Monday. “We’ve met with two different vendors.”

Stelzer said an employee would be able to use the software to clock in and clock out and to request time off. On a broader scale, it would provide a schedule of who’s working and who’s off.

“For some departments, that scheduling side would be helpful,” Stelzer said.

The data would then be uploaded into the payroll system. Currently, all the time cards are keyed in manually.

“There are a lot of management benefits that could be gained by purchasing this software,” Stelzer said. “Automating things, keeping track of time-off requests and overtime. One of the other advantages is the software has the capability to track an employee’s time by project or task, which would be useful.”

The more customized software costs $47,500 upfront, and $25,200 annually; the other’s cost is $15,750 and $10,800 annually.

“It seems to me like this definitely would be worth it, and the cheaper option makes more sense,” said Brush, who chairs the finance committee. “We’re constantly talking about the need to measure time spent on things. It’s difficult to make improvements unless these things are measured. The fact that there would be an accessible, consistent system for measuring data across all departments would enable us to compare apples to apples better. I think we’d be in a better position to make more informed decisions about city operations.”

The committee voted to recommend to City Council the purchase the lower-cost software in 2016.

“It’s not likely to result in substantial savings in the finance office,” Brush told council. “However, the real benefit is time-tracking.”

By Gary Budzak

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Gary Budzak may be reached at 740-413-0904 or on Twitter @GaryBudzak.

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