Analytics app simplifies complex entitlement landscape

A new solution using an Alteryx Analytics app promises to help New Zealand businesses navigate the complex and ever-evolving leave entitlement legislative landscape.

In recent years, the complex Holidays Act legislation has led to significant entitlement and pay issues, with many organisations’ payroll systems failing to calculate leave in accordance with the Act’s requirements. Kiwi employers need to hold comprehensive records showing how leave entitlements are calculated, paid and held, and any errors dating back at least six years need to be corrected.

“To say organisations struggle with compliant leave payments is an understatement,” said Elisha Nuttall, Consulting Senior Manager at Grant Thornton New Zealand.

“Many organisations are inadvertently non-compliant with the Act and have to go through a remediation process at some point. In many cases, uncovering their underpayments can be a time-consuming and expensive process.”

Due to the complexity of the calculation and volume of data involved, Grant Thornton chose Alteryx Designer to recalculate entitlements for 21,000 employees of one of New Zealand’s largest cleaning companies using six billion rows of timesheet data.

Since then, Grant Thornton has helped businesses of all sizes achieve compliance with Act, continuing to improve template models in Alteryx and reducing the cost to clients. Not satisfied with incremental improvements and wanting to reduce remediation fees, Grant Thornton teamed up with Mission Intelligence NZ and embedded their knowledge into an Alteryx Analytics App with the ability to process any employee leave scenarios at scale.

“Historically, the remediation process involved manually recalculating a sample for a client and extrapolating it out to estimate the full underpayment or developing a costly client-specific model for a more complex recalculation,” said James Martin, founder of Mission Intelligence.

“Given the various leave scenarios, accuracy is a challenge. With the Alteryx Analytics App, we can recalculate more accurately than ever and recalculate 10 years of historical leave payments and entitlements for an employee in just five to 10 seconds.”

To meet the numerous types of employees’ working patterns, including employment duration and movement between part-time and full-time contracts, the team also built an initial set of 42 different leave scenarios into the Alteryx Analytics app with 12 different configuration options, and they intend to build on this as they discover further scenarios in live deployments. This allows the application to be deployed at scale with flexibility and affordability, to help NZ organisations both large and small.

“The cost of getting leave payments wrong can be staggering,” said Nuttall. “Sometimes, the fees involved in the end-to-end remediation process can exceed the total value of underpayments to employees. Our new payroll recalculation solution can simplify the remediation journey for clients and make the process more cost-effective.”

“In a complex and dynamic employment market, organisations need to embrace new tools and approaches that empower employees and ensure workers of all types are fairly compensated,” added Heidi Badgery, Managing Director of Alteryx ANZ.

“The scalable Alteryx Analytics model built by Grant Thornton and Mission Intelligence can help New Zealand organisations of all sizes to navigate the sea of complex employee entitlements to avoid costly penalty fees and, ultimately, put their employees first.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Андрей Яланский