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,” she said, “so we know how important it is to have the best, most efficient systems and processes for ourselves and our employees.”

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

MRG implemented Rippling, a process Barbara characterizes as “way better” than previous experiences. 

With restaurants in multiple states, if hours didn’t match the payroll report, someone would have to check manually, separating 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 post them. PTO also had to be recorded manually.

All of this went away with Rippling. The Implementation Manager came to Barbara 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.”

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.

• Cost savings: MRG cut weekly payroll costs by one third and saved $6,000 in filing costs.
• Time freed: MRG saved more than 1,000 admin hours on payroll, benefits, and more.