Boatshed Catering

The situation.

Boatshed Catering has operated out of Palmerston North since 2007. The team is around 18 – full-time, part-time, casual fill-ins. Catering at scale, with predictable peaks around weddings, corporate events, and conferences.

Owner Lisa was running payroll by hand. No software. The IRD PAYE calculator, a notebook, two hours of uninterrupted concentration every week. Once a month, the notebook went to the accountant in hard copy.

The structural problem with that setup is not that it is old-fashioned. It is that payroll has hard deadlines and people whose livelihoods depend on it being right and on time. When the business gets busy – which is exactly when staff are working hardest – the two-hour focused block for payroll is the first thing to slip. The result was processing running late and team payments running later.

A growing catering business cannot pay its team late. That is not a workload problem. It is a structural one.

What we changed.

The intervention had two pieces:

• PayHero was implemented as the payroll system. The notebook went.
• Weekly payroll moved across to Admin Army as a managed service. Lisa sends timesheets through on Monday. Payroll is processed within hours.

The structural change was that payroll stopped being a task the owner had to find time for and started being a process that ran predictably.

Holidays Act advice and payday filing came inside the same engagement – the technical compliance work that small operators routinely get wrong because the rules are not built for them.

The outcome.

Every payroll run goes out on time. The two-hour weekly block of Lisa's concentration came back. Payslips deliver automatically. The team gets paid when they should.

Worth noting: Boatshed Catering was Admin Army's first client. The engagement started in December 2016. It is still running.

In Lisa’s words.

"I had never even considered that this was something that I could outsource. I jumped at the opportunity to hand this task over to someone I trusted."

"Now I just send through the timesheets every week on a Monday and payroll is processed within a couple of hours. It's one less thing to worry about."