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Ultimate Care is a New York City-based home care company with over 2,500 employees. Caregivers provide companion care and daily living assistance at the client’s home, as well as personal care and 24/7 living care.
As is typical in the healthcare sector, the nature of the business means employees’ hours are varied, overtime is common and payroll is tied directly to revenue. Catching every discrepancy and inefficiency, every week, is business critical.
But Ultimate Care’s payroll & scheduling teams’ Excel sheets were highly complex and time consuming. It was difficult to find problems hiding in the data.
And worse, Ultimate Care was not aware of any potential significant issues. Like many businesses, they relied on one key assumption: if they followed the common process correctly, they would find their blind spots.
When Celery approached Ultimate Care’s Senior Financial Controller Mark Jay, he’d never seen an automated audit layer built specifically for payroll teams.
“We didn’t think we needed it,” he says. “But it was a no-brainer to try it out. The Implementation was seamless, easy and unheard of - all you have to do is upload your pre-payroll set template Excel sheet. Anybody can do it in two minutes.”
What he saw gave him a shock.
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Ultimate Care’s overtime costs were 25% higher than they thought. Employees they assumed were working 50 hour weeks were in fact doing 80 hours. Various hidden scheduling issues were eating into margins.
“I showed our Operations Director Natoya Smellie,” Mark says. “She went crazy. There were lots of overtime hours that weren’t approved, or shouldn’t have been scheduled. She couldn’t understand how we’d missed this.”
“I was able to identify and address overtime issues in real time”, says Natoya. “Before we used Celery, our overtime reports were really time-consuming. And clearly, they weren’t catching every issue.”
The Ultimate Care Operations team hadn’t spotted the problem because they’re not pro Excel users and they don’t have the time to run complex manual checks.
With Celery, you don’t need to. It gives you the visibility you need to find needles in the haystack - in seconds.
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