Small but Mighty Nonprofit Saves Time and Money

Building Workforce Support for Affordable Housing Advocates

Small businesses on the surface might seem as though they would be easier to run, but that’s far from the truth. Wisconsin Housing Alliance (WHA) is a small trade association that provides promotion, education, and government relations to manufactured and modular housing in Wisconsin. With one location and four employees, they are small, but the workload is not.

We asked Executive Director Amy M. Bliss to share how they have managed and what led them to isolved. She shared that between running their organization and handling all their human resources (HR) themselves, they were incredibly busy. Staying on top of processing payroll and managing tax filing became overwhelming for them, so they needed a new solution.

Initially looking to eliminate the hassle of tax filing completely, WHA turned to isolved. Prior to the change, they were using another software that wasn’t working for them. The software led to several mistakes and was not user-friendly. According to Bliss, isolved was able to help them by “offering easy-to-use software that is intuitive.”

They now use the isolved People Cloud™ platform to process payroll, give employees access to self-service, onboard and offboard employees, a learning management system and to verify I-9 Work Eligibility Verification. According to Bliss, they have saved “many hours of labor, which equates to cost savings.” 

It’s estimated that People Cloud’s integrated payroll process can reduce administration costs by more than $145,000 over a three-year period.

When asked if she would recommend isolved to someone, Bliss said yes because of how simple the software is to use and how much time she has been able to save. Without isolved, they would have to hire another part-time employee because of the amount of time that Bliss reports spending on payroll and reporting. This would mean they would incur recruiting costs on top of adding another person to their payroll.

Moving Toward Full Automation

Now that they have streamlined payroll, they have a vision of making all their HR processes more automated. Bliss believes that isolved can help get them there because of the “interface that is accommodating to not only to an employer but also to employees.” Everyone has access, saving Bliss and other employees the hassle of answering repetitive questions that employees can find answers to on their own.

Further down the line, they hope to use isolved for benefits such as health savings accounts (HSA) and flexible spending accounts (FSA), which would ease up the workload even more. But for now, they have been able to spend less time focusing on the small tasks and more time on what matters.