"A solution that enables us to do the work that we want to do."
Christians Against Poverty (CAP) offer a vital lifeline to people and families who find themselves in financial trouble. Their award-winning debt counselling services change lives for tens of thousands every year.
The people who work for CAP are motivated by this common purpose, but increasingly found themselves encumbered by lengthy and time-consuming manual HR & Payroll processes.
For Anna Haldane, CAP’s Change Management Lead, this was a problem. “As a charity, we’re here to serve our clients,” she says. “And a lot of those processes were making that work more difficult.”
There were three clear factors in CAP’s decision to select xcd as an HRMS provider. “This is a big spend for us, as a charity,” says Anna Haldane. “We needed a partner that could meet our requirements. Meet them within a price that worked for us. And a partner who we felt we could trust.
“With the xcd team, right away we felt there was honesty around what they could and couldn’t do, which you don’t always see with other providers.”
CAP asked us to help them ‘lean up’ the day-to-day admin for their HR team and free up time across the wider organisation so people could better focus on their core mission.
As part of an ongoing phased implementation, our solution specialists have formed a close working relationship with the team at CAP to fully understand their unique challenges and objectives.
This has led to the implementation of xcd’s single solution HR and Payroll, Performance (which they’ve rechristened ‘Development’) and XCD reporting.
As a Salesforce customer, CAP was perfectly placed to benefit from xcd – an application built on Salesforce. “Salesforce was another tick really,” says Haldane. “Because an important part of what we want to do here is integrate systems as much as we can.”
With xcd Performance (development), Reporting, and comprehensive core HR & Payroll, CAP now have their data and processes in one place on a single, secure database.
“The reporting side has been really helpful,” says Anna Haldane. “Things like gender pay gap reporting were taking a huge amount of time before. We wanted to provide better reporting functionality across the whole charity which, without the system in place, was just impossible to do.”
As part of the next phase, paperless expenses and recruitment & onboarding will be brought on.
Leveraging the flexibility and scalability of Salesforce’s CRM framework
For any not-for-profit organisation operating in today’s competitive environment, good data practice, efficiency and access to accurate measurement are crucial in developing evidence-based justifications for funding and investment.
The membership charity Homeless Link exist to ensure everyone has a place to call home and the support they need to keep it. Among the many ways they do is, they provide training, advice, guidance and research to their members, frontline homelessness and housing agencies.
Their members use a client relationship app, ‘In-Form’, built on the Salesforce platform by Homeless Link.
Leveraging the flexibility and scalability of Salesforce’s CRM framework, this app is an easy-to-use suite of tools that incorporates location maps, staffing, tenancies, rents, service charges, health and safety checks, maintenance, repairs and more.
It enables their users to operate in a commercially savvy way, managing every client touch point, delivering a consistent and effective service, and measuring performance in real time.
When Homeless Link looked for a way to bring people data and processes onto Salesforce, to apply the same relationship management standards to their own employees, they found xcd.
Many of their existing workflows, like time, absence, performance and expenses were largely paper based, which made generating a real time view of resources and effectiveness incredibly difficult.
The Homeless Link team needed to overhaul their approach to information handling and data recording across various people processes.
We embedded our professional services specialists within the Homeless Link team to understand precisely how we could streamline and translate their paper system onto the xcd solution.
Out of the box we created a comprehensive system of record.
Data around Payroll, attendance, leave, overtime, performance and salary review is now all on a single database, mobile accessible, and powering Homeless Link’s suite of xcd reporting and analytics tools.
With data held digitally, Homeless Link have brought live metrics on sickness, absence and performance into their everyday planning decisions. They can quickly and easily create reports on how staff use their benefits package to make fact-based recommendations on workforce strategy.
Similarly, time and attendance reporting in real time allows their team to build a clearer picture of how and where their people were spending their time, enabling better resourcing decisions and improved efficiency.
Moreover, Homeless Link now have an Employee Relationship Management system that’s highly flexible and scalable to their needs.
The next stage of the project will see them switch over to the Salesforce Lightning user interface, further streamlining the user experience. Recruitment, appraisals, learning and development will also be brought online.
For an organisation already proficient on the Salesforce platform, there really is very little limit to what can be achieved.