Item: Deputy
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Deputy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Deputy across the whole organisation, our main advantage and reason for implementing Deputy was the removal of paper timesheets which, due to the remoteness of many of our employees, were often late to be received or lost, etc. Having real time payroll information allows us to process pays more efficiently and much quicker than before.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Real time clocking on and off for employees in various locations.
Communication between all employees via the news page.
Reminders to managers about birthdays & anniversaries.

Cons

Use of the app to clock on and off when no internet connection is available.
History of changes can be hard to read and report on, would like to be able to easily see what changes have been made by whom in a summary report.
We couldn't work out how to set up tasks to give employees reminders or come up automatically before clocking on, seemed to have to go in and check the tasks each day.

Return on Investment

Time savings is our biggest impact, the time spent processing our payroll has halved with the use of Deputy.
Accuracy has improved, the data uploaded into our pay system is the data that the employee has entered & manager has approved so there is no third party keying that can be mistyped.
Employee Satisfaction - being able to check their hours worked and see when their leave is approved means they can check anything they are unsure about before pays are processed instead of needing to wait for a payslip to check things.

Alternatives Considered

iAuditor

We use iAuditor in conjunction with Deputy for different tools. It would be good to be able to combine & do everything from Deputy but we have found iAuditor more user friendly for items such as recording weekly toolbox meetings, assigning tasks, auditing machines using custom forms & check boxes (which we can create and report on). We have also looked at other electronic timesheet apps prior to using Deputy but have generally had trouble getting support and answers to queries about the programs.

Key Insights

Do you think Deputy delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Deputy's feature set?

Yes

Did Deputy live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Deputy go as expected?

Would you buy Deputy again?

Yes

Usability

I think Deputy is very usable for general users but I do find the set ups can be complicated and difficult to troubleshoot yourself when you have an issue. As an example, we have a structure where various supervisors need to see leave requests & often approve timesheets for their crews but managers above them in each location would then approve the supervisors time sheets. We have recently had issues with managers not being able to see supervisors timesheets & also employees not being able to send leave requests to any managers in their area. It took us quite some time to sort this out as it was difficult to see what was causing the issue.

Implementation Rating

While we are happy with the system now & believe it has really benefited our business, the implementation process was significantly longer and more complicated than we were led to believe at the time we signed up. Prior to signing we had not had any contact with Deputy, our contact was a Telstra sales person who made everything we requested seem very simple & already available. However, after discussing some of our business needs with Deputy (after we had signed up) it became clear that some of our requests were either not possible or not as easy to set up as we were told prior to the sale. After spending a lot of time working through it with Deputy we were able to get the main points working, but it was certainly not as simple as we expected & was extremely time consuming for us as well as Deputy employees.

Other Software Used

AccountMate, Attach, Beacon Software Solutions

Likelihood to Recommend

Deputy is appropriate for us as we have employees in many different locations. It can be time consuming and ineffective trying to collate manual time sheets from all area's and then find there is always paperwork missing. Having the ability to upload into our pay system makes running the payroll more accurate and faster. Small businesses with very few employees would benefit less from using Deputy as there wouldn't be much of a time saving for them.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Deputy Review