Client case study:
CR-T

We are an IT service provider working in three specific areas.  

Firstly, we handle software and hardware sales, which involves people purchasing IT hardware or IT licensing.  

Secondly, we have our service departments. We have a managed services team, as we are an MSP (Managed Service Provider). We assist companies with their IT needs. For some companies, we provide full IT support and act as their entire IT team, managing everything. For others, we cooperate with their existing IT teams to manage systems or networks they either do not want to or cannot manage due to bandwidth limitations. 

Thirdly, we offer professional services, which is where I work. We work primarily with contractors to execute projects for other companies. These IT projects include, but are not limited to things like, wiring projects, migrations, hardware server refreshes, virtual environment setups, and web development and design.  

Essentially, anything that falls under the IT umbrella. We bring in high-tier specialty resources to help companies achieve the necessary advancements in their systems or infrastructure.

My responsibilities include managing projects and contractors and making sure our onboarding and time tracking processes are as simple as possible for these contractors. I also help ensure that we are pulling in the right contractors for the right job, making sure scopes are correct and managing projects and contractors from the pre-sales process all the way through the project completion.

It's specific to IT technical work and it ranges from help desk tasks like, "Hey, my Outlook isn't working and I'm getting this error" or "My computer won't boot up," to more complex issues like IT Security Ransomware attacks. 

We have contractors across the world, which is fantastic. It makes it easy to work in specific time zones that fit the clients needs, or if we need to do work after hours.  Some projects can't be done during the workday because it interrupts people's ability to get their jobs done. Regarding the number of contractors we have, our pool ranges from 75 to 125 and we are working with new contractors all the time.

We used a spreadsheet to try and organize our contractors and everything we needed to track, it was difficult. We move so fast, and we interview and onboard so many different contractors, making sure that we had our paperwork in place was challenging and ensuring we have all the information for onboarding was difficult because it was all spread across different departments. We had Professional Services, Finance and our Office Manager, and we all had different spreadsheets with different information on them. It felt like we had this information all over the place. 

On top of that, the system that we were using for time tracking is more built for FTE’s but it’s important that the contractors got in there and put their time in correctly because it’s also how we invoice. The system is not super user-friendly and contractors had to take several steps to get to their worksheets, enter their time, review their time, and then submit it. It was a long process, and we had a lot of feedback from our contractors that they didn’t like using it. The feedback we got was, "Is there a different way we can do this? This is not super straightforward. It's clunky. It's easy to make mistakes, and it's hard to go back and fix the mistakes."
 
Before TalentDesk we were doing wire transfers, and it was a very manual process. Our finance team had to go through each timesheet, review it, and then schedule that wire directly to their bank. Manual processes like that are prone to human error and mistakes. With TalentDesk we don’t have to worry about that. 

We had been slowly looking for a contractor management tool for a while. CR-T had decided to move away from our old payroll system to a new one and this is when we really got serious about it. We would have had to onboarding contractors into that system, which means they would have needed a license for each contractor plus some custom onboarding features since that platform was specific to employees and not really set up for contractors.

I would say it was the feedback from our contractors. We want to make sure that they like working with us, and the biggest pain point from their perspective was entering time in the system. It just was not user-friendly. Honestly, for my role, it was just a matter of looking at their timesheet as a whole. So, reviewing their timesheet and approving it wasn't bad. The challenge was that they didn’t want to use our system. It was not good, and to be honest, I still have to track my time in that system. I wish I could use TalentDesk! 

Our contractors' response has been very positive. They say it's very straightforward, very user-friendly, and very easy to go back and make changes as needed. The feedback has been fantastic.

I would say it's having one central location where we can go and get the information we need. Before TalentDesk we had to rely on our memory, information in tickets, and spreadsheets. With TalentDesk, we can literally log in, look at somebody’s profile, and it tells us all the info we need right there. What their role is, where they're located, if they have multiple rates for different types of work, their contact info, everything is right there, which is one of my favorite features. We have a couple of contractors with different rates, and it was hard to work out previously with payments.  

But now it's easy to see what rate goes along with what role. It's easy to see what their skill set is, and it's easy to see their contact information. On top of that, being able to go into the reports and pull the reports that our leadership team wants has been great. The centralized location is probably the biggest improvement from my perspective. 

The second improvement would be the feedback from the contractors. They like it so much better.  

And then third, it does save time from payroll and 1099 taxes at the end of the year. I don't know exactly how long it took our finance team to go through and do all the payments, I know it was all manual - I would estimate probably a lot of time. And now all we have to do with TalentDesk is review the worksheets as they come in, approve them, and then we don't have to worry about it at all, which is amazing.

Absolutely. We've had it in place for about a month and a half now. The month of June was the first month that our finance team and President were happy to see that everything was aligned with our payroll dates in the system. In the previous system, we had no ability to change payroll dates. If we changed it for contractors, it changed it for everybody, which created HR issues and was just a mess. 

The fact that we were able to work with your Customer Success team, who communicated our needs clearly to the development team, was crucial. You guys were able to create a feature that allowed us to match up the payroll dates. 

Invoicing dates with our system were aligned so that we weren't trying to invoice our clients for May in July, just because the systems were off by one or two dates. This change has been drastically different. It has significantly reduced the workload. 

Before this was implemented, one of my roles was reviewing our project invoices with our finance team. Because the dates were off, we would have to go in and detach specific dates from the invoice. We paid the contractor, but we couldn't close out the timesheet because one day remained open. For example, our dates ran from the 1st to the 15th and the 15th to the end of the month. The TalentDesk invoices, likely due to the time zone difference, ran from the 1st to the 14th, leaving the 15th unaccounted for. Contractors wouldn't necessarily input their time on the 15th promptly, forcing us to keep the pay period open in our system and delaying invoicing. This process required many steps to ensure we weren't invoicing for time we hadn't paid for or vice versa. 

It's a bit confusing, but the changes over the last three weeks or the last three pay periods have been life-changing for me.

It was taking two employees at CR-T to go through and review just our project invoices, making sure everything on my side looked correct and everything on her side looked correct. 

We were spending at least three hours a week, both of us together and sometimes pulling in another coordinator, going through invoices and timesheets, making sure we were invoicing for what we hadn’t paid contractors for and that everything was correct. 

Now we can get it done in an hour. So, it's saving us quite a bit of time.

Yeah, the onboarding process that you guys have, and the fact that you can create onboarding templates and be specific about what you want to ask specific people, has been fantastic. Before we had TalentDesk, we were asking questions via email to these contractors, like "Hey, can you send me what your role is? Can you send me your top 5 skills? Can you send me your availability, how many hours you want to work, and what kind of projects you want to work on?"

We've been able to customize the onboarding forms so that the contractors literally can't start until we have that information, which has been fantastic. One of the biggest pain points was trying to get our NDA back before our sales team took a new contractor and was running with it, trying to get meetings and everything set up. Now they can't. The first step in our process is to invite the contractor to TalentDesk. They fill out the form, and once it's approved, we're good to go. That kicks off our internal process to get an email created for that contractor. So the sales team has to wait until we have that email address, which doesn't happen until the NDA is signed. The onboarding forms, templates, and user information of the user profile have been super helpful.

When we were first brought onto TalentDesk, we had a different account rep who was fantastic. When I found out that we would be transitioning to a new rep I was a little bit worried because generally when you transfer to new account manager things sometimes fall through the cracks or it’s not a smooth process. Our new account manager came in and picked things up right where our previous rep left off, and it was seamless. It's been perfect. He's so fantastic and keeps track of everything we've asked for. It's been fantastic working with him. He's made things happen and is very responsive. He should get all the credit for getting the feature for specific invoicing dates. It was him pushing everyone at TalentDesk to say, "We need this." So, it's been fantastic. The customer service has been amazing.

I would say that not having to worry about making sure every single person gets paid the correct amount is a significant improvement as well as the general feedback from our contractors has been outstanding. The payroll change impacts our finance team the most because we have literally taken the whole payment process from them. They don't have to handle it anymore, which is a huge relief for them. 

I would guess it probably took a couple of hours per week to manage payments for our contractors beforehand, and now they don't have to do anything. It's so nice. Additionally, the ability to pay people in different currencies is amazing. I think everybody is currently being paid in US dollars, but just having that option is fantastic.