How The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television Used Collage HR to Regain Time and Mitigate Risk

Vince Kwong,
Director Of Finance And Administration.
Company: The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television
Industry: Non Profit Media Arts Organization 
Location: Toronto
Company size: 40 Employees

The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television is the largest non-profit professional media arts organization in Canada. With a membership of more than 4,000 emerging and established industry professionals, we are dedicated to developing, recognizing, celebrating, and advocating for Canadian talent in the film, television, and digital media sectors.

The Canadian Academy strives to foster industry growth, knowledge, inclusion, and mentorship through a series of professional development programs, talent activation initiatives, and networking opportunities. Aimed at creating a more equitable and diverse Canadian screen-based industry, they are committed to discovering and nurturing all levels of talent through professional training and guidance. The Canadian Academy also produces the Canadian Screen Awards, bringing together the screen-based industry annually to celebrate the country’s top talent in the film, television and digital sectors at Canadian Screen Week.

Problems with the status quo

By 2019, The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television had outgrown the capabilities of their in-house HR solution. Despite Vince Kwong’s seniority as Director of Finance & Administration, he was stuck spending a significant portion of his work week calculating PTO, updating payroll information, and managing benefits for his growing employee base with disconnected processes. Vince was inundated with tasks that interfered with his ability to focus more on his strategic priorities, so he needed an efficient, permanent change to his workflow.

When Vince researched ways to automate and streamline his administrative duties, he found that Collage HR was the only choice that accomplished everything he needed effectively. Where other HR solutions may have an interconnected functionality, Collage HR’s intuitive and sleek interface provided a unique solution to their payroll concerns which caused it to stand out among the crowd. On top of that, Collage’s expedited migration was a cherry on top and made the decision to switch to Collage HR easy.

Launching in weeks instead of months

When Vince migrated their disjointed systems to Collage HR, he was assigned a dedicated Onboarding Manager at Collage HR to provide support for optimal ongoing use of Collage HR’s full suite of intercommunicating features and capabilities.

“There were minor challenges in setting up the initial balances - however the Collage HR staff was instrumental in ensuring the transition was a success."

His dedicated Onboarding Manager helped him customize the platform to ensure a successful transition for the organization. While other providers charged thousands of dollars in onboarding costs, with Collage HR Vince managed to accomplish a full HRIS migration in weeks while staying within the non-profit’s budget. 

Cutting down core HR Administration Time

One of the most crucial improvements that Vince experienced with Collage HR was the time saved through the paperless self-serve onboarding feature. Previously, Vince spent hours preparing and storing employee onboarding documents. Now, he can set up a new hire in minutes.

The extended functionality of Collage HR allowed Vince to drastically reduce onboarding time, as well as benefits administration. Vince previously needed to delegate a significant amount of time between his team to manually enter employee information twice: once into benefit enrollment forms, and again into the benefits administration portal. With Collage HR’s Benefits Administration functionality, Vince has been able to cut that task out of his workflow entirely.

Automated, elegant PTO tracking impacted the entire team

With their original in-house solution, Vince was burdened with individually calculating each employee's PTO and remaining balances. Maintaining these running calculations created a bottleneck in employee’s ability to get time off requests reviewed by managers.

Today Vince uses Collage HR’s automatic PTO calculation. With Collage HR, Academy employees can simply make time off requests, and managers are able to promptly approve or decline them. By setting up his team’s time off rules during onboarding, he got back 10% of his work week in saved time.

Collage HR’s automatic calendar sync gives Vince access to up-to-date time tables, creating improved visibility for the whole organization. With the built-in calendar integration virtually eliminating scheduling issues, Vince has enabled his team to have the freedom to book personal leave with automatic clear indications of when employees will be out of office.

“[Collage HR] increased visibility of time-off balances, allowing employees to take time-off more frequently and decreasing vacation accrual liabilities at year-end.”

Collage HR’s automated PTO tracking module has directly improved the work-life balance of the team, while also enabling Vince to reduce financial liabilities on the company end. Between the improved clarity and time-saved, Vince’s colleagues are empowered to easily take time off on their own without needing him to coordinate manual entry. 

HR management that also connects benefits and payroll

Because of Collage HR’s unique ability to connect HR with third-party benefits and payroll platforms, Vince eliminated significant data entry work driven by his previous need to collect HR information and manually enter it into his HR, benefits and payroll systems separately. This elimination of administrative work effectively put Vince in the position to spend his time on strategic work instead.

"It’s cost-effective and saves a lot of administrative hours. Collage HR keeps our processes together in one location instead of multiple manual processes that are separate from each other”

In minutes Vince can easily enrol an employee, remove them from a plan or modify their coverage before shortly syncing the updates with their benefits carrier, payroll management and HR system all at once.

As of today, Vince does not have to dedicate time to manually review an enrolment form, or perform double data entry ever again.

According to Vince, the transition to Collage HR has not only saved him time and money, but most importantly helps assist him in delivering a superior employment experience to his team.

    The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television is one of the thousands of businesses who choose Collage HR to manage their HR, Payroll, and Benefits.

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