Simplifying the Human Resource Operation for Agincourt Pentecostal Church

ABOUT THE AGINCOURT PENTECOSTAL CHURCH

Agincourt Pentecostal Church (APC), founded in the early 1950s, is also known as the Agincourt Full Gospel Church and is located in Toronto, Canada. It is a multigenerational church with a mission to help the people of the Toronto area experience a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and to lead people of all ages and backgrounds to become Spirit-filled Christians whose life priority is to daily live and be a witness for Christ. Agincourt Pentecostal Church is a member of the Toronto Community Churches along with three other churches. The church has around 3,000 attendees on Sundays and approximately 10,000 people are associated with the church. 

Background

The church needed an efficient system where they could self-manage their personal data, view/apply/approve leave with ease, submit/approve timesheets and produce accurate reports on a daily/yearly basis. Agincourt looked at various HR Solutions and was referred to OrangeHRM by one of OrangeHRM's Partners. By analyzing APC’s requirements, OrangeHRM was able to offer a fully functional HR system that included Employee Management, PTO/Leave Management, Time Tracking, and Reporting & Analytics features.

CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

Running an organization with 54 staff members and one main campus with four satellites requires a fair amount of effort to manage all the employees. APC’s HR processes were managed using a combination of paper files and Excel spreadsheets resulting in labor intensive, time consuming and error prone data entry. 

“When OrangeHRM came along, one of the main features that caught our attention was the ability for staff to self-manage their HR data in terms of leave, but the big one was the ease of timesheet submission and approval”

Agincourt Pentecostal Church's requirements were not well defined and documented when they started looking for a solution. Upon testing and thorough analysis of their HR processes, APC found significant problems faced by the organization and identified the following challenges that need to be addressed by the solution they selected. 

Inefficient Time Tracking

Manual timekeeping resulted in tedious tracking of employee's activities on a daily basis and much more tedious on a yearly basis leading to many errors in payroll processing. APC also have part-timers where timesheets are an essential requirement and in which they were not able to efficiently track the activities due to the lack of a proper tracking mechanism. 

Manual Leave Management

The inability of employees to manage activities such as applying for leave made it tedious and time consuming for both employees and HR Personnel as they were using a paper-based system which resulted in many delays. 

Lack of Self-Service Ability

Personal information management was also done manually and any updates/changes to be made were communicated to the HR personnel who in turn updated the Excel sheet/paper copies. Considering Agincourt Church's employees' technological prowess, this was the cause of much disappointment. 

THE ORANGEHRM DIFFERENCE: AN ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION

“OrangeHRM works effectively and is widely accepted by our staff at this point.” 

Employee timekeeping was the biggest issue APC had, as they felt the information was not accurate and affected the payroll processes which are tied directly to time tracking. By utilizing OrangeHRM’s built-in Time Tracking module, APC employees were able to update their timesheets on a daily/weekly basis and submit it for approval to their Supervisor or HR Personnel easily. This allowed accurate time and attendance tracking electronically thus eliminating the risk of human error. The HR Personnel are also now able to run real-time employee reports on the numbers of hours spent by an employee for a particular activity/project on a daily, weekly or even on a yearly basis. Part-timers are also given Employee Self Service (ESS) user access giving them the ability to submit timesheets for approval thus lifting a huge burden from HR Personnel in tracking their activities and entering it in the payroll system. 

Secondly, leave management was also a major issue, as the church wanted its employees to be able to manage their leave time effectively and accurately. As a solution to this problem, OrangeHRM offered a flexible Leave Management module where an employee is given ESS access to the system to self-manage their leave. Employees and Managers are now able to view leave entitlements, apply for leave, and approve leave while all this data is fully automated to reflect within the entire system reducing the time spent on duplicate work and correcting errors. 

Furthermore, Agincourt Pentecostal Church handled its employee information manually making the process time consuming and error-prone. With OrangeHRM, employees are able to make relevant changes in their personal records which are allowed by the organization while the system updates these changes concurrently and eliminates duplication of information, and human error. 

Lastly, as the system is fully hosted on the OrangeHRM cloud, employees and managers are able to access the system and conduct activities such as maintaining timesheets, applying for leave, running reports, etc. from anywhere anytime. It also saves money that would have been used to purchase paper, files, cabinets, etc. before moving to OrangeHRM.

“OrangeHRM has simplified our HR processes in terms of timesheets, and leave, and the fact that it is cloud-based make it easier for employees to access the system anywhere” stated Pastor Dwight Anderson, Director of Operations and Human Resources, Agincourt Pentecostal Church.

OrangeHRM provides a complete and customizable HR solution that enables organizations to perform all HR operations with ease. An industry leader in human resource management, its secure web-based software helps organizations manage their people, talent, and HR processes across the globe.