How Huntington Beach Cut Timecard Processing by 96%

Since 2021, Huntington Beach City School District (HBCSD) has applied innovation and outcome-oriented thinking to dramatically improve efficiency, reduce manual effort, shorten approval cycles, improve data quality, and ultimately increase productivity across the entire district. The district has a simple yet revolutionary belief: operational excellence throughout the district has a direct impact on student achievement. More than 33 processes, including timecards, conference reimbursements, absence reports and vendor forms have been moved onto online forms, e-signatures, and approval routes. However, after moving timecards online, the payroll team faced a new challenge: transforming data from Informed K12 into a format compatible with the Orange County OCDE payroll system required 6-10 hours of manual Excel work per pay cycle. Through partnership with InformedK12, Huntington Beach achieved a 96% reduction in timecard processing work, dropping from 6-10 hours per cycle to approximately 15 minutes, with 100% accuracy in the pay cycles.

Challenge

Paper-Based Operations and Knowledge Loss

Prior to partnering with Informed K12, HBCSD was still heavily reliant on paper. As Assistant Superintendent of Administrative Services Jenny Delgado recounts, "everything was piling up, but we didn't have enough people trained." Furthermore, "people were leaving, retiring, getting promoted, and the knowledge required for payroll is very specific, very technical...not something where you could just leave a manual behind and someone could just follow. We want to spend more time supporting people, not handling paper."

Streamlining processes and capturing institutional knowledge into internal controls was extremely important for HBCSD to sustain operations far into the future. This is particularly important for payroll; unlike budgets and accounting, where mistakes can be caught through reconciliation, "you cannot make mistakes with payroll". As Delgado explains, "With payroll, as soon as you make a mistake, if you don't catch it right away through the audit process, you're going to get an angry phone call."

Initial Success Moving Off Paper

Three years ago, HBCSD moved timecards off of paper and onto Informed K12. Immediately the payroll team noticed the benefits of the platform's tracking technology. "That was fabulous; the team stopped getting phone calls from people saying 'I sent it to you' but [the timecard] was probably still in the mail, in that inter-district envelope, and we never got it," Delgado recalls. "Now we know exactly where the timecards are, if they're with the employee, the principal, or perhaps our level and we made a mistake."

Emergent Integration Challenge

With timecards fully online and employees trained and happy, the Payroll team set their sights on new challenges: the data now securely stored in Informed K12 needed to be transformed into a format that could be readily uploaded into the Orange County OCDE payroll system. "We had to download the data, massage it, use every tool in Excel, Pivot Tables, VLOOKUP in order to put all that data into a format that the county requires," says Delgado.

Payroll Technician Debbie Jones recognized the opportunity for a more efficient process. "There's got to be an easier way. After the timecards were all done, I had to download them. And then I had to figure out, who has multiple pay lines, who has multiple pay rates? It was just very time consuming. I was adding lines. I was adding formulas to move the units over to the [OCDE] template. I had to make sure the account numbers were all changed, move over the remarks. It took me like a good 6 to 10 hours to do all of this."

This was exacerbated by the tight timelines HBCSD had to abide by: their pay cycle ends on the 20th of every month, leaving the team a mere 6 days to process all of the timecards. According to Payroll Lead Jessie Lee, "when handling payroll, its time-sensitive nature can make getting stuck in the formulas very frustrating. When you check the calendar and see that the formula isn't working, it can be incredibly stressful."

Solution

Partnership Approach

In July 2023, the Informed K12 product and design team, accompanied by CEO Sarah Chou and CTO Qian Wang, met with HBCSD during a week of customer visits in Orange County. The team was immediately struck by how eager and prepared HBCSD was to talk about their challenges.

As Chou recalls, "I don't think we've ever gone to a district and had a team prepare a PowerPoint already to tell us about all the things that they wanted to see. We've seen more and more timecards post-pandemic than ever. Timekeeping is very complex across county offices and usually unique to each district as well." For Delgado, the challenge was clear: "we have to be able to just get that data, extract the data, and create some kind of bridge. We know what fields are on the other end. We know what OCDE requires from our time cards. So we just need somehow to create a bridge."

Integration with Existing Systems

Of paramount importance was to continue supporting all of the capabilities unique to HBCSD. To achieve this, Informed K12 worked with a partner specializing in integrations and interoperability: ConnectK12.

This collaboration resulted in the following simplifications:

1. HBCSD payroll logs into ConnectK12's secure portal at the end of each pay cycle.

2. Payroll uploads a new OCDE template into the portal.

3. The portal automatically retrieves data from Informed K12 timecards.

4. Over a dozen data transformations and error checks are automatically performed.

5. Payroll downloads are completed into an OCDE Record 60 compliant Excel file.

Outcomes

96% Reduction in Manual Work

Within a few months, the payroll team achieved dramatic results. What used to take hundreds of manual steps now takes the team a few clicks. All of this can now be done entirely through the ConnectK12 portal, thanks to Informed K12's export API. Time spent processing overtime timecards went from 6-10 hours per payroll cycle to approximately 15 minutes. This is a 96-98% reduction in work, or a 24-40X gain in productivity.

"Now, with this portal, it's just instant. You get instant results. The data itself is 100% accurate, and we don't see any errors."

Payroll Lead Jessie Lee, Huntington Beach City School District

100% Accuracy

As of the last 4 pay cycles (January-April 2024), the team reports 100% accuracy. The built-in error detection, combined with all the benefits of moving timecards online, allows payroll to instantly spot and remediate issues. "The impact of the portal can be summarized in three words: simplicity, efficiency, and accuracy, states Lee.

Improved Cross-Departmental Relationships

HBCSD's timecard digitization and integration initiative is just one of many examples of how Informed K12 drives innovation across teams on the most critical Jobs to be Done at the district. "This has really improved relationships and communications with school sites and departments," says Delgado. "The technology is here, artificial intelligence is here. Now our team has more time to support school sites, other priorities, and benefits."