Payroll, in About an Hour

The challenge: Paper files, phoned-in time, and a tech stack that couldn't keep up.

Before hh2, payroll at Santarossa was a paper operation. Field crews phoned in their hours each week. The payroll processor wrote everything down on time cards, then keyed each line into Sage 300 by hand. Start to finish, the run could eat two and a half days, and it still cut close to the bank deadline.

HR was no different. Personnel records lived in filing cabinets. Then a roof leak destroyed the cabinets, and there were no backups.

Sage 300 had been the company's accounting system for two decades, and it kept doing its job. The challenge was the workflow around it. Travel and per diem amounts came in as units with no rate attached. Custom reports required hand-built conditions. Remote access meant a remote desktop session every time a question came in from the field. And when a five-year union audit landed, the team realized just how much manual lift it would take to pull what the auditors needed.

Santarossa briefly tried a competing platform's time tracking. The field rejected it. Line-by-line, day-by-day entry was too much overhead for crews whose job is production, not data entry. Within three months, the team was using hh2.

The solution: Built natively for Sage 300. Adopted module by module.

Santarossa's path to hh2 happened in pieces, in the order each problem became urgent. That's how most contractors actually adopt back-office software. Each layer reinforced the value of the next.

For Brenda, the deciding factor was the depth of the integration. "It was very important that the two worked well together," she explains. hh2's modules were built natively for Sage 300, which means data moves between the two systems without middleware, custom imports, or recurring cleanup. Time tracking, AP, and payroll all share the same source of truth as Sage. For Santarossa, the practical effect is that the two systems behave like one.

That depth of integration is also why hh2's implementation methodology includes a forensic look at the data already flowing through Sage. Setups that have run unchallenged for years sometimes turn out to have quiet errors built into them. Santarossa's did.

Less time on every payday. No more bringing work home.

The clearest before-and-after is the payroll run itself. With time entered by noon on payroll day, Brenda spends roughly twenty minutes spot-checking entries: verifying rate increases, confirming jobs are coded correctly. Then she sends a report to the company president for review. The handful of live checks print, the reports save, and she's done. 

Across the week, Brenda estimates she gets back three to four hours of payroll and HR admin time. Reporting is the quiet hero. The job costing report, in particular, lets her filter, choose columns, and save layouts. That's the kind of customization Sage 300 makes possible only for users willing to build it from scratch.

The five-year union audit was the test. "Sage reports were kind of hard to pull the information for everything they needed," Brenda recalls. "hh2 worked really well with the union reports."

Year-end, simplified.

Brenda is most looking forward to her first full year-end on the new platform. "All of those payroll reports are going to be a lot easier to pull for the audit, the W-2 process, the ACA filing. All of that is going to be a lot easier. I'm looking forward to that." For a controller who, until recently, was taking work home to keep up, that ease has a name. It's called Tuesday night off.