RANCHO SANTA FE — During the Sept. 1 Rancho Santa Fe Association board of directors meeting, Association controller Matthew Ditonto pitched the idea of a new payroll system. Candidly, Ditonto said that the Association has had significant deficiencies with its payroll system.
According to Ditonto, there is a gap with the current payroll system they are currently using. He pointed out how the Association has payroll branching out into the RSF Golf Club as well as the Osuna Ranch.
“What we have is a time clocking system for the hourly employees which are the majority of our employees,” he said. “And that time clock system does not talk with our payroll system, so we’re pulling down information from our time clock.”
On the sidelines, work is being done to rectify this and that is what is affecting the efficiency. Ditonto pointed out that this current system is not cost-effective either.
“I propose to go with either two payroll processing companies that could implement all of this stuff into a cloud-based payroll software and it’s pretty much just turnkey,” he said. “The price is not a cost barrier. It’s almost comparable to what we’re spending right now.”
Ditonto said they had two companies in mind for a new payroll system. A one-time startup cost hovered around $4,000, Ditonto said, and there was an additional cost of about $500 per month thereafter.
“But we’re picking up a lot more power and what it really is doing is we’re outsourcing a lot of the manual labor that’s going on in our department that doesn’t need to be,” Ditonto said. “We just don’t need to be doing this stuff because when you do a lot of manual labor, you end up with a lot of errors, problems, and issues. And it costs us more money to do this internally than it does just to outsource it; it’s a fraction of the cost.”
It was noted that a potentially new payroll system was not an action item — it was being brought up for discussion.
Board president Fred Wasserman said the topic would come back to the Finance Committee.
“The Finance Committee will review it, select a company, and then make a recommendation to the Board,” Wasserman said. “And then at the next Board meeting, you’ll have a whole presentation of the payroll.”
