Evention modernizes processing time, freeing up accounting resources, eliminating errors, and saving thousands of dollars annually.
Problem
The Hyatt® Regency is Chicago’s largest hotel with over 2,000 suites and 228,000 square feet of meeting space. The hotel averages 30 events per day in over 60 rooms and manages a staff of hundreds of servers, bartenders, coffee crew, and managers. Event Payroll at Hyatt is complex. With 8 captains at multiple pay grades and labor contracts that govern wage and gratuity amounts based on event type, employee type, and task type, managing the event payroll required numerous calculations. Furthermore, gratuities for event types are typically distributed among all employees that work that day while other events distribute gratuities only to the employees that worked that specific event.
Hyatt dedicated a full-time resource to managing the gratuities and wages. Captains used paper time sheets to record who worked on each event and what task each employee performed. The paper time sheets were then manually entered into Microsoft Excel where calculations were run to distribute gratuities. Reports were then manually created from Excel and the data was again keyed into a final payroll system so that checks could be cut. With the numerous amounts of events and data, errors were often entered into the system. In some instances, errors in the range of $20,000 were uncovered due to the manual nature of the payroll management.
Solution
Hyatt was able to fully utilize Evention to achieve its main goals. By implementing Evention, payroll management now can be handled in one afternoon. The servers and accounting department are working from a common system, with a centralized database on the Hyatt intranet, allowing critical data to be accessible in real time to departments.
Results
With data in one central location, Hyatt reduced the time spent on payroll calculations dramatically with enormous annual savings. At Hyatt, errors during the payroll processing were common and involved the lengthy process of issuing manual checks to correct. With Evention, using a common system, and eliminating re-entry of data, the number of manual checks has become part of the past. The paper time sheets used to track servers and tasks for each event have been eliminated and the captains can enter data into Evention via the Hyatt intranet. The accounting department no longer needs to re-enter this data into a separate system but simply process the event and generate the desired reports. From here the payroll information is exported from Evention into ADP to generate the paycheck.