What do you get when, almost overnight, close to half the country starts working from home? Amongst other things, a lot of trash apparently. For Don Doidge, Head of HR & IT at doorstep trash and recycling collection company Trash Butler, that meant having to rapidly grow his team of butlers to keep up. It’s a task, he says, that would’ve been infinitely harder had they still been using their previous platform Paylocity.

“There's no comparison. Rippling has made my life so much simpler when it comes to onboarding.”

The search for a modern, flexible platform

Not long into their first year with Paylocity, it became clear the solution was not going to be able to meet Trash Butler’s needs.

For one, they weren’t able to link their payroll to more than one cost center with Paylocity—which posed a problem for the collection service provider that had butlers frequently working across multiple locations.

On top of that, their inability to integrate with Trash Butler’s other apps—including popular applicant tracking system Lever—meant the team lost much of the efficiencies they’d previously had.

In fact, Paylocity increased their manual workload instead.

“They just weren’t well-suited to our type of setup, and that resulted in constant issues with payroll and onboarding,” Don explained. “And Paylocity’s lack of flexibility meant we couldn’t do anything about it.”

“We’d basically hit a wall with Paylocity—they couldn't scale with us.”

So when Don kicked off the search for their next solution, they didn’t leave a stone unturned.

“We did a deep dive into all the providers out there. We didn’t want to move again in a couple of years—we needed a flexible platform we could build off of, to set ourselves up for future success. That’s what we found with Rippling.”

And to increase their chances of finding the right solution, Don enlisted both a professional firm, as well as members of his own team, for guidance. Which led to an interesting situation when the hired firm’s recommendation countered his team’s.

But for Don, the choice was simple—go with the team.

“To have my entire team of subject matter experts say, ‘We've used them all, and Rippling is the best choice because of this functionality, and that reason’, and have them there to then rally the rest of the organization as well, was incredible.”

And the effort of that search process paid off. According to Don, Rippling has been welcomed across the board at Trash Butler, especially amongst its heaviest users: the HR and Payroll teams.

“Rippling is just so much more thoughtful than any other system we’ve worked with before. It’s very forward-thinking, and brings really powerful features and capabilities in such a simple and intuitive package that practically anyone can use them.”

Decreased onboarding time & ‘ghosting’

For Don and his team, the switch could not have come at a better time. As the pandemic put pressure on the team to get more butlers onboarded—and fast—Don credits Rippling as one of the main reasons they were able to keep up.

Fewer errors with role-based onboarding flows

One of the key ways Rippling helped the Trash Butler team speed up their onboarding was with its customized onboarding paths. Previously, the team would onboard employees, only to find later that there was an exemption or vehicle requirement that had been missed. That meant they’d need to go back to the employee for more information or to correct the mistake.

“Today, Rippling automatically triggers the right paperwork and onboarding flow based on the role we’re hiring them to do. That’s made onboarding faster and more accurate, and saved our team an enormous amount of time.”

Streamlined onboarding saves hours

The Trash Butler team also saw significant time-savings from Rippling’s simpler, more streamlined onboarding process.

“Paylocity would send multiple welcome emails to new hires—one to welcome them, the next providing a username, another to let them know their password was coming,” Don recounted. “With so many emails, our new hires would get lost—especially those who don’t really check their email.

“We’d lose days sometimes because they didn’t know how to start onboarding or they’d lost their passwords.”

It also meant Trash Butler’s recruiters spent about 30 - 45 minutes in their day following up with new hires or resetting their passwords.

“With Rippling, we’ve been able to avoid that entirely,” Don explained. “Now, new hires get just one email that says here's your offer letter, click here, enter your password, then sign in and complete your paperwork.”

Thanks to the streamlined onboarding, they’ve also seen a significant drop in the time taken for new hires to complete their onboarding with about 75% completing their paperwork in 72 hours or less.

Easier onboarding meant fewer ‘ghostings’

And that simplified onboarding process has also resulted in an unexpected but welcome benefit—fewer new hire ‘ghostings’ (i.e. the situation where a candidate would simply stop engaging with Don and his team after receiving their offer).

“Before Rippling we would lose about 55% of our candidates at the onboarding stage. They just ghosted,” Don explained. “With Rippling, that just dropped down to 43%.”

With a faster, more intuitive onboarding process, they simply had fewer candidates abandoning the process midway or losing track amidst multiple onboarding emails and instructions.

Powerful, intuitive reporting

As Head of HR & IT, Don’s responsibilities run the gamut from recruiting to benefits administration, coaching and talent development, and more.

And to execute on those responsibilities as effectively as possible, he believes in the importance of having good, reliable data to base decisions on—something he didn’t feel he had with his previous solution.

“I have a lot more confidence in the accuracy of our reporting now than I did before,” Don explained.

Another thing he appreciates: how much more intuitive it is to build reports from scratch in Rippling. “With Paylocity it was a lot more work. The UI was very dated, and to add new fields you had to know the exact nomenclature Paylocity used, or it was impossible to find. We ended up building one massive report with every field we could possibly map, then manipulating it outside of the platform.”

“I also like how easy it’s been to share reports with the rest of my team in Rippling, and the specific control I have over what information gets shared and with whom.”

Other highlights include:

Automated compliance and notifications

Rippling has also been invaluable to Trash Butler from a compliance perspective.

“Today we operate all across the US, and making sure we’re compliant with the requirements of each state—especially when it comes to our field team—is a challenge,” Don explained. “Thankfully, Rippling’s helped make that easier.”

“Currently we’re using Rippling’s Time & Attendance offering, which has a number of features that help us keep compliant, depending on the state the employee is in. For example, our field team in California gets automated reminders when they have to take mandatory breaks, and they then have to go into the mobile app and attest that they’ve taken them.”

Seamless implementation and a feeling of true partnership

For Don and his team, the implementation process with Rippling was a huge contrast to what they’d had with previous vendors, including Paylocity.

“We went into our implementation with Rippling feeling like it was more of a partnership, right from the get-go,” Don described. “We agreed on a clear agenda and timeline of everything we were going to accomplish, and the team was always available to answer any questions we had along the way.”

And unlike most providers, the handoff throughout the process was incredibly seamless as well. “From the sales team to our implementation managers, and from our implementation managers to our current dedicated Customer Success and Technical Account managers—we didn’t have to rehash what we’d done with the previous team, or what our goals and objectives were. They just knew.”

“With Rippling, we honestly feel like we have somebody that's looking out for our success as much as we are internally.”

Access to over 500 integrations, and reliable support with more

With Paylocity, Trash Butler felt hamstrung by the limited number of integrations available to them. And on top of that, the team was not particularly helpful with Trash Butler’s efforts to build integrations with key partners.

“With Rippling, when we have a partner we want to bring on, we get a response usually within a few hours. Or a day or two at most,” Don said. “With Paylocity, it would take months of constantly following up, without much result at the end.”

Faster payroll and more accurate P&L tracking

Running payroll is also significantly faster—dropping from several hours to less than one to process payruns across 50 states.

A lot of that savings comes from being able to now link their payroll to multiple cost centres, which has meant no more time wasted with manual report exports and VLOOKUPs. Now, they can import their data directly into Quickbooks with Rippling’s Quickbooks Online integration.

Besides the time-savings, being able to attribute their employee hours to the right cost centers has also meant more accurate profit and loss tracking.

“We have over 500 work locations across the US. Rippling being able to support that has been a big win for us,” says Don.