Barbara Powell had a problem—several, in fact. The Vice President of Operational Support for Millennial Restaurant Group, LLC (MRG), Barbara grew up in the restaurant business. When she started at MRG seven years ago, she handled everything from accounting and payroll to insurance, lawsuits, and worker’s comp. Now, her direct reports include the Controller and the Accounting & Payroll specialist.

“We've all been in the restaurant business most of our lives,” says Barbara, “so we know how important it is to have the best, most efficient systems and processes for ourselves and our employees.”

This is because like many restaurant groups, MRG has lots of young employees working at 25 locations in three states. Before Rippling, Barbara used Paycor (after three years with ADP), which involved too many steps; onboarding new hires was outsourced to a third-party company, which would then send payroll information back to Paycor and/or ADP.

Information was all over the place, which was inefficient and made it easy to introduce errors into every step of the process. ADP didn’t work either, because it declined to support a paperless onboarding system, which drove Barbara back to Paycor.

But Barbara found that legacy systems often cannot support the complexities and speed of modern employment—there was no aspect of operational administration that didn’t require a 21st century upgrade.

“The idea of being able to bring somebody on quickly without them having to fill out, you know, five pages of an application—that’s the Stone Age, right?” says Barbara.

Efficient management of a complex workforce

With restaurants in multiple states, if hours didn’t match the payroll report, someone would have to check manually, separating out each restaurant and then by hourly and salaried employees. They had to send emails and follow-ups to 300 people during open enrollment, then enter information by hand into each system. It was cheaper to hand deliver W-2s than mail them. PTO also had to be done manually.

All of this went away when MRG implemented Rippling, a process Barbara characterizes as “way better” than previous experiences. Rippling’s Implementation Manager came to them with suggestions on how to be more efficient when setting up their departments in Rippling. “She did magic,” is the way Barbara puts it. “There hasn’t been a person that we’ve dealt with at Rippling that hasn’t been helpful.”

Seamless benefits integration

The company moved to a weekly pay schedule, benefits became fully integrated, and W-2s are now fully electronic and take no time at all. “The benefits integration piece (is a favorite),” says Barbara, “because that always caused me a lot of anxiety around whether or not we were going to be the reason somebody didn’t sign up on time.”

With Rippling, managers can see all salaried and hourly employees, and hours and PTO can be easily tracked and synced, to the tune of, Barbara estimates, “thousands of hours and thousands of dollars” of savings.