Bayley Construction, a West Coast general contractor and commercial construction firm with 70 years of experience in the industry, came to Criterion with complex payroll challenges and several disparate platforms that needed to be integrated. With both union and non-union employees working across California, Washington, and Arizona, their need to modernize their Payroll and HR systems was essential for their continued success.

Challenges

Before Criterion, Bayley Construction was using Microsoft Dynamics to run payroll manually, and the process took more than an entire working day to complete. The custom reporting necessary for accounting and payroll was also done manually, which required pulling data from multiple sources and compiling them into spreadsheets. It was time consuming to say the least.

In late 2022, Bayley recognized it was time to update their tech stack. After some consideration, they chose Acumatica as their ERP and Procore as their project management software. While they were making great use of both platforms, these tools weren’t communicating with each other. They were still working with a disconnected system, manually routing data from one platform to another to make all the pieces work.

At the same time, Acumatica advised Bayley that their payroll system wasn’t designed to support multi-state, multi-union payroll very well. The folks at Bayley needed a way to make payroll more efficient while remaining in compliance with union rules, taxes, and other laws.

What’s more, Bayley still had no dedicated HR system. They had little visibility into time off requests and balances, and were managing employee data in spreadsheets. With virtually no self-service features for employees, their HR department was inundated with support tickets — requests to view paystubs, time off balances, deductions, and more were eating up a lot of time.

Solutions

Bayley Construction needed something to fill in the gaps. At first, Adam Pinsky, their Chief Financial Officer, began looking into several HRIS platforms in hopes they would solve the growing HR problem. But when Acumatica recommended Criterion for multi-state, multi-union payroll, our HCM turned out to be the best solution for their situation.

By early 2023, Bayley had successfully integrated Criterion’s Payroll and HR modules with Acumatica and Procore for a fully connected system across departments. In the, future, they plan to use the Talent Engagement module to automate some of their onboarding processes. In fact, they are currently configuring the Criterion system to run annual appraisals.

“I think their whole implementation process is really good. It’s really well managed. We had a chance to compare it to some others … and Criterion is definitely the best.”

Despite the heavy lift of setting up a new system with extensive general ledger mapping, Bayley reports that Richa Singla, their Implementation Manager at Criterion, made the process much easier than it would have been otherwise.

“Our Implementation Manager was Richa. She was terrific. She’s very knowledgeable, very helpful. She bent over backwards to help us.”

Results

In addition to a great user interface, Bayley Construction has enjoyed several benefits from using Criterion, including:

More Efficient Payroll Processing

The team at Bayley wasn’t looking for anything complicated. They just wanted a payroll solution that worked for their needs. Since migrating to Criterion, they’ve been able to automatically process payroll with zero payment delays and no compliance audits. Instead of processing payroll manually, or finding workarounds to make other payroll platforms work for a multi-union employee base spread across multiple states, payroll is now simpler and faster for the entire company.

“It’s cut down on payroll processing time. I think we’ve certainly knocked a few hours out of that each week.”

As part of the Payroll module, Bayley Construction has also enjoyed streamlined management of benefits and deductions. These features allow for a simple setup and deployment of benefits packages without building a new package for every employee.

“One of the things that works really well with Criterion is the integration of benefits and time off plans…basically you set up a benefit plan and just apply a benefit plan to employees. Rather than having to manage a whole lot of separate deductions, it’s all contained in the benefit plan. That’s a really nice feature.”

Fewer Employee Request Tickets

With self-service features built into the payroll module, employees at Bayley Construction now enjoy the ability to view their paystubs, deductions, and time off requests themselves, all with a user-friendly interface.

Today, their HR department spends far less time responding to service tickets. With a growing roster of employees, this is a significant productivity improvement. In the future, they plan to continue leveraging the self-service features to further improve efficiency.

Seamless Integration With Other Tools

Criterion’s integration options give users the ability to build their ideal tech stack from the tools that work best for their needs. For companies using disconnected systems, Criterion is often the perfect HR solution to fill in the gaps.

In the case of Bayley Construction, Criterion’s native integrations with Acumatica and Procore have been essential to their success. Here’s a bit about how they’re using these integrations:

• When a new team member is hired, Bayley logs that employee data in Criterion with the HR module. That data then syncs to Acumatica and Procore to ensure accurate personnel records across departments.
• In day-to-day operations, Bayley employees use Procore’s construction-specific project management software to track time in the field and manage jobs across multiple states. Job cost data, location data, and timecards all sync from Procore to Criterion. From there, Criterion automatically calculates payroll for each timecard according to various tax rates, locations, union rules, and more — and distributes payment to all employees with zero delays.
• To keep their accounting records accurate, payroll data needs to be added to their general ledger in Acumatica after each pay cycle. Luckily, thanks to the existing integration, new journal entries are automatically synced to Acumatica with no manual effort.

With these integrations, Bayley is able to leverage the combined power of these systems, with Criterion’s help to make it all run smoothly and efficiently.

Powerful Custom Reporting

Bayley Construction is also making use of Criterion’s powerful reporting features. While our HCM already allows users to create hundreds of reports from virtually any field, Bayley needed some custom logic to make their system work smoothly. To satisfy these needs, the team at Criterion has built multiple custom reports for them, including:

• 401K Reports - Bayley Construction’s 401K provider requires some key information to be delivered in a highly specific report format. With all the necessary data spread across multiple disconnected sources, building this report used to take about two days. Since this is a recurring report, Bayley was wasting a lot of time building these every pay period. Since then, Criterion has built a custom report that Bayley can now use to submit this 401K data with the click of a button, freeing up time for their HR department to tackle other challenges.
• Labor Reports - Adam Pinsky, their CFO, also requested custom labor reports to gain better visibility into the financial performance of Bayley’s workforce. Criterion has developed these reports from existing data to give Adam granular insight into labor costs, spending patterns, losses, profit margins, and more.
• Job Cost Data - Criterion also developed some custom logic for Bayley’s job costs from Procore, so they can also sync their general ledger with Acumatica on a weekly basis. This helps tailor their accounting process to factor in project location and other job-specific data.

“The reporting is pretty robust. We’re just kind of scratching the surface in terms of the flexibility of it.”

Continued Support

As Bayley Construction continues to discover everything that’s possible with Criterion and the Acumatica and Procore integrations, our team remains available to support them on their journey. In addition to building custom reports, we take time to answer every question as thoroughly and accurately as possible to help Adam and the rest of the team at Bayley make the best use of our platform.

“Their support is crackerjack. They get right back to us. They’re really helpful and knowledgeable.”

Integrate Your Processes With Criterion

Designed to help companies streamline their payroll and HR processes, Criterion is the perfect solution for construction companies looking to modernize. We can help you customize the platform to work smoothly within your existing system — no matter how complex or outdated it is. You’ll save time pulling everything together manually, so you have more time to run your business.

Discover an HCM that connects your HR department to everything else in your business. Book a demo today to see how Criterion can transform your operation.