We recently interviewed Amanda McNeill, HR Manager in People Solutions, and Michelle Flores, the Senior HR Generalist in People Solutions at AcctTwo Shared Services to learn more about their experience with Employee Cycle’s dashboard and HR solutions.
Related: AcctTwo customer success case study
AcctTwo specializes in accounting software, outsourced accounting, and bringing clients to the cloud so that their accounting functions can be done from anywhere, at anytime. AcctTwo works with multiple organizations and industry segments from software, high-tech, not-for-profit, residential and commercial services, biotech, healthcare, professional services, oil and gas, finance, and more so it was important to have a solution that was able to work across all sectors.
Prior to working with Employee Cycle, AcctTwo realized that their data was not providing them with the information they needed to make smart decisions for their HR requirements. Once they were able to experience and demo Employee Cycle’s solution, they realized that they had found the solution that would help take their company to the next level of data and innovation for HR decision-making.
Let’s explore how AcctTwo used Employee Cycle’s data-driven approach to help strengthen their business by reviewing their recent interview.
Question: What did AcctTwo need from their Employee Cycle product and how did it support their reporting requirements for executive team members?
Employee Cycle’s dashboard helped McNeill and Flores report to their executive team more effectively, understand metrics and trends, and shorten the time it took to complete due diligence reports. They found that all measures featured within Employee Cycle’s solution have been time-saving and effective with regards to helping them achieve their day-to-day goals.
“Employee Cycle gave us tools at our fingertips to justify what we know in our gut is the right thing to do. That’s been huge for us. As an HR professional over time, you can develop a ‘spidey sense’ or a ‘third eye’ for what you know your organization needs. But what’s been beautiful about Employee Cycle is that they’ve actually provided me with the data and the research that I need to show our executive team to demonstrate that what we’re asking for will enable the business to grow.”
Amanda McNeil, HR Manager
Employee Cycle’s dashboards allow McNeil to provide real-time data to the executive team by pulling up a dashboard instead of having to create a presentation after running a long diagnostic via their PEO. That process would have taken an entire workday if she had the data waiting on her desk and would require her to collate and calculate the data herself. Now, using Employee Cycle’s comprehensive dashboard and tooling system, she doesn’t have to do that – which saves her time for other tasks and allows her to focus more on people solutions than report-collation.
She notes that the executive team now asks for daily data deliveries and she can now confidently display the data they require in a moment’s notice, saying, “I can quickly project it on a screen right in front of them – it’s great.”
The Employee Cycle dashboard allows for data-driven decision-making and helps AcctTwo’s executive team feel confident in the solutions they’re recommending – empowering her to succeed in her position.
Question: How did Employee Cycle change AcctTwo’s access to onboarding and retention data?
Flores noted that they used to have to calculate turnover rates manually and they’ve seen a dramatic increase in retention because they can now monitor successful departments, find out what they’re doing, and mirror that success in other departments – allowing them to collate and understand data instantly and customize that data to display for each department.
“Having accuracy saves us up to six hours per week of excess work and provides us with more accurate, real-time information – something we never had before.”
Michelle Flores, Sr. HR Generalist
AcctTwo is now also able to monitor new hires, open jobs, recruiting needs, when departments are short-staffed and may be under stress, and so much more.
Flores noted that she uses the departmental data sections regularly, especially when building and rebuilding departments, ensuring there’s not too much strain on the business and individual employees. For example, she might notice that a year ago this department had thirty people and it now only has twenty – yet they’ve only made three new hires in the past quarter – so they can solve problems before they become an issue.
These dashboard metrics have allowed their HR team to monitor retention, recruiting, and onboarding metrics closely.
Question: How does Employee Cycle help AcctTwo with roadmapping for the future and keeping stakeholders informed?
McNeill and Flores discuss how the data is used to create roadmaps for each department.
Flores has created dashboards that can be used by the executives and people in each team to make the data more accessible and easy to understand by different stakeholders.
She can also use the sharing feature to share subsets of data, email links and screenshots, and create bookmarks where people can view the data at any point. Plus, people can view the data they need without having to ask an HR specialist to run a report, which cuts down on time and makes everyone more efficient.
Question: Regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion data, how does Employee Cycle help AcctTwo understand more about company diversity and other culture-centric metrics?
McNeill explained that many small companies don’t have data-rich ways to track their diversity, equity, and inclusion metrics. But with Employee Cycle’s dashboard, they now have this data at their fingertips. It has not only helped AccTwo design better product solutions to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion but also has helped them do that for their clients as well.
In addition, McNeill explains that she’s been examining their attrition data such as, for example, the employment of females versus males and how they can make all parts of the business more equitable.
“Now that we have Employee Cycle’s dashboard installed, one of my favorite things is looking at how that data sits in each of the different departments and figuring out ‘okay, this department’s numbers look really great.’ Now we can go back and conduct interviews to figure out what this department is doing well – something that wasn’t translating into other departments for us – and it has helped us get a better eye on where we should look at what’s going right and what’s going wrong to make sure that we’re carrying best practices across the organization.”
Amanda McNeil, HR Manager
The data provided by their Employee Cycle dashboard has also helped them understand their headcount and hires by department, as well as other areas that are experiencing change that need to be monitored closely.
McNeill talked further about how AcctTwo has been working hard to evolve their onboarding process, understand how to improve turnover by tenure and also how to retain employees beyond their first year. Employee Cycle’s dashboard has helped them better understand how to measure these metrics and make qualified solutions to implement their goals accordingly. They may look at data and think they’ve missed their goal for the quarter, but when compared to their data from last year, for example, they actually are able to see that they’re up 13, as an example, and that fact in itself helps them maintain equilibrium in the organization.
She discussed that having the data that Employee Cycle is able to provide to AcctTwo provides their business a better overview of how to make employees happy and increase retention.
Question: How does due diligence play a role in reporting and help find metrics when using Employee Cycle’s solution?
McNeill and Flores explained that using Employee Cycle has helped tremendously with their due diligence reporting. Many of the numbers and data provided by Employee Cycle are numbers they need for due diligence – something that their previous solution simply would not provide to them easily.
“Employee Cycle’s responsiveness is just outstanding. We don’t know that we ever could have gone through this due diligence process without it. And we worked a lot of long days, long nights to make those reports and it would have been longer and more stressful if we didn’t have all this data at our fingertips…”
Amanda McNeil, HR Manager
As a result of using Employee Cycle’s solution, AcctTwo now has the data they need both in real-time and at a glance – allowing them to save valuable time, money and effort by reducing their M&A due diligence process as they were getting acquired by leading public accounting and consulting firm Baker Tilly.
Question: How has Employee Cycle enabled AcctTwo to fully adopt their data solution – making it work for the better of the organization?
Once their agreement was completed, Employee Cycle quickly provided data coaching sessions for AcctTwo to get them up to speed with how to use their custom-built dashboard, as well as how it would help improve their business and meet their business needs.
“Employee Cycle followed up with us on everything, any question that we had, any solution that we’ve offered. We were part of testing the initial environment. So, anything that we came back with and offered or any suggestions or modifications we needed, they were really on top of doing that.”
Michelle Flores, Sr. HR Generalist
McNeill explained that Employee Cycle also brought many HR trends to their attention that they hadn’t noticed – providing them with even more value than expected.
“Our business is centered around working with data-driven CFOs. Employee Cycle sat down with us and talked us through what our executive team, as well as customers, would be interested in hearing about. Employee Cycle helped us to learn to speak our team and customer’s language. And I think the data coaching calls gave us some really great ground to stand on, solid evidence to present, when we had to go back and make suggestions that impacted the people-side of the organization.”
Michelle Flores, Sr. HR Generalist
For HR professionals out there who know what businesses need but don’t have the language and the data to back up those gut feelings, Employee Cycle will help you create a unified data solution and also coach your team to help them make the most out of their new technology.
Both Flores and McNeill also noted that using the Employee Cycle product was fast, easy, and no-fuss. McNeill remarked, “It’s pretty much no-fuss – you can get in there and get what you need, which, honestly, it’s such a relief to have at least one tool that I don’t have to do mental gymnastics to get what I need out of it.”
She also noted that when working with Employee Cycle, they provided a list of needs and how we “worked hard to get through it,” so that our product provided the exact specifications and needs for this particular client (and those beyond).
Finally, McNeill noted that Employee Cycle “feels more like a partner.” – which is exactly how Employee Cycle wants each of their customers to experience. Our goal is to make sure that all of our clients feel as if Employee Cycle is on their side, helping them every step of the way to transform their HR data and revolutionize their business.
To learn more about AcctTwo’s solution that was created for them by Employee Cycle or to schedule your own demo with the Employee Cycle team, connect with us today.
