Just Associates

December 10, 2018

Just Associates Gains Crucial Project Insights and Streamlines Time Collection Using Journyx PX

What Journyx did for us:

We can understand so much more with the use of Journyx and our ability to easily extract, manipulate, and analyze data. I rely on Journyx for KPIs and reports because I trust the data it gives us.

– Lora Hefton, COO and Vice President of Operations, Just Associates

Their Story

Just Associates is a recognized leader in Health Information Data Integrity solutions, providing healthcare organizations with customized solutions that improve health data quality and result in enhanced revenue cycle efficiency, increased patient and clinician satisfaction, and improved patient care. They provide a variety of services in every aspect of health data quality, including consulting and outsourced management. They began using Journyx in 2012, starting with 34 users. In 2014, they began experiencing substantial employee growth due to Federally-mandated requirements for Health Care facilities. As the company experienced rapid growth in their staffing model, they grew to over 130 employees in 2015. Today, they employ around 100 staff who are classified as Exempt and NonExempt/as-needed.

Challenge

Just Associates started out tracking time using Excel spreadsheets – which was cumbersome, but manageable for the 30 employees they had at the time. It also allowed them to track the specifics of their project work, but it had a significant impact on their payroll administrator, who spent a considerable amount of time entering the timesheet data into their payroll and financial systems. “Not only was it time consuming to create and distribute new Excel timesheets with project names and drop downs every time a contract was signed,” said Lora Hefton, COO and Vice President of Operations at Just Associates, “it was difficult to approve time and analyze staffing requirements for strategic planning purposes.”

As a result, they decided to move everyone to entering time directly into their accounting system. While it solved one problem with manual data entry, it created additional problems for their virtual staff. The accounting system did not allow staff to select the correct projects and COGS categories, or approve overall time by project and administrative costs. It also required an enormous amount of coordination with their IT team to manage access.

Journyx Solution

Just Associates had very specific time tracking and reporting needs due to their unique staffing model. They needed certain levels of detail to be captured on each client project against estimates and actual hours needed, the ability to access time data to use in other systems, and a solution that was web-based for their virtual staff.

“With a rapidly expanding employee base, we needed to lessen the time impact and ability to process payroll,” said Hefton. “We also needed a system that would link to our time system and easily transfer crucial project time and data into our financial system to speed up payroll processing time, understand financial impacts and complete month-end close within 15 days.”

Journyx PX fit the bill on all counts. Using the Scheduled Projects capability, Just Associates can create a nested master project with multiple subprojects – enabling them to assign employees and tasks to subprojects and giving them the timesheet approval flexibility they needed.

“We needed the ability to schedule staff on a weekly basis, add in PTO and unavailable time schedules, and forecast upcoming client project staffing needs,” said Hefton. “Although PX allocates staff across multiple weeks, we utilize the Journyx API and pull current data into the scheduling application we created.

Benefit

Journyx’s ability to tie together all their disparate systems – payroll, financial, and scheduling – has resulted in several big benefits to Just Associates.

“The integration of [Journyx PX and our scheduling application] allows us to forecast more accurately as well as understand actual time spent compared to scheduled,” said Hefton. “We have been able to identify specific project categories that were under-performing and over-performing, allowing us to stream line our project processes.

“In some cases, we have seen a 20% change based on process improvements. This has translated to the ability to lower costs which are passed on to our clients.”

Journyx PX has also reduced the amount of time it takes to fill out, approve, and process timesheets – significantly:

• Employees complete time entry daily, allowing project leaders to catch potential COGS errors before timesheets are submitted. This has shortened their timesheet approval process from 24 hours to 4 hours – an 80% decrease.

• The time it takes employees to fill out timesheets is also easier and quicker. Just Associates can assign employees just to the projects on which they need to track time – reducing errors from mis-tracked time.

• Time entry into their payroll system has gone from 16 hours to 4 hours using PX’s payroll export functionality – a 75% decrease in time.

• Time required to enter data into their financial systems has decreased from 40 hours to 4 hours – a 90% decrease.

“We can understand so much more with the use of Journyx because of our ability to easily extract, manipulate, and analyze data,” said Hefton. “I rely on Journyx for KPIs and reports because I trust the data it gives us.”

About Journyx

Journyx enterprise time and expense tracking software allows companies to quickly implement a complete time and expense tracking solution using existing business data. Journyx features flexible accrual calculations, multi-level approvals, mobile entry, integration with existing business systems, data validation, and local or cloud installation. Since 1996, Journyx has provided web-based time and expense tracking solutions. For more information, visit www.journyx.com.