Fire and Rescue Services have faced increasing pressures regarding financial and operational performance. Complex crewing models based on proximity, skill set and roles work towards a faster response and a higher level of service. However, achieving this requires thorough planning to find the correct blend of personnel to ensure resource availability in every station without compromising the Service’s financial stability.
At the same time, firefighters’ commitment to the Service, whether is under the role of wholetime or retained firefighter, or a mix of both, deserves proper and fair compensation. Keeping track of training, incident attendance and other non-operational activities has become increasingly hard because, in most services, these activities are accounted differently towards compensation.
Complex Processes Lead To Deficient Outputs
Many Station Managers struggle to determine the exact number of hours allocated by every worker to all their different activities. Complex modified duties, like detached duty, or shift swaps, make it easy to lose track of worked hours, which can lead to headaches for managers and firefighters alike. Besides keeping track of availability and shifts, there is also the challenge of accounting for incident response activities.
Capture attendance may not seem as hard. But trying to input response into the payroll system is prone to human mistakes, as response times can be affected by the firefighter’s location at the time (also affecting disturbance fees), or rounding rules can be overlooked. For managers, chasing this information and inputting it into a payroll system can take up to 8 hours any given day.
Besides, interacting with the system can be daunting, since every activity may have a different code, which means that this information needs to be “translated” into the system’s “language” to get the desired output.
Fireservicerota’s Payroll Engine Simplifies It All
FireServiceRota has come up with a powerful integration that allows Station Managers to export every detail of relevant information to their Payroll System, regardless of how complex the payroll rules might be. It all starts with defining which activities that are already being captured in the Resource Management System (FireServiceRota) are taken into account for compensation. Incident turnouts or attendances, , training hours, community outreach activities and everything in between is considered and configured in collaboration with station and operational managers. FireServiceRota’s incident and activity reports already possess valuable and needed information regarding each member’s individual performance and the time they invested in their duty.
Managers can review, modify and send reports of worked hours and under which concept for approval to superior officers, who are able to modify, reject or accept them. Once the reports are approved, they are ready to be processed. FireServiceRota’s Payroll Engine does the rest. It inputs the work done and processes data to match each activity to its corresponding code and determines if it is eligible for payment. It takes into consideration holidays, training sessions, extra shifts, overtime, incident related payments, and every other relevant activities and their accrual factor towards compensation.
Exporting To Your Payroll Software
The output of the payroll engine is a custom file designed for the Fire Service’s particular payroll system. Operational managers along with finance representatives define the fields, format and frequency of the exported files. Then, a simple input of that file into the corresponding payroll system provides accurate compensations to every member of the service. The system warns in advance if there are reports missing approval before the export, to make sure managers don’t miss any information. Even if they do, amendments can be made at a later time by authorized personnel and the system can identify modifications to create a supplementary export file.
Conclusion
In summary, FireServiceRota provides a key feature that allows Fire and Rescue Services to optimise financial resources and manage retained and wholetime firefighters in a single system while helping the service provide every firefighter accurate and fair compensation for their performance. It reduces workload on managers and provides key insights that allow a better resource management and improve the level of service. We acknowledge that every Service is different, so if you have any questions on how FireServiceRota can help you, feel free to contact us at cor@fireservicerota.co.uk
