Challenge: With more than 300 employees across 14-plus program areas, the nonprofit ran payroll manually and scored very low on an external compliance evaluation.
Solution: isolved Optimization Services fixed a misconfigured HR setup and added certification tracking and automated reminders, so payroll ran cleanly and compliance stayed on track.
Impact: Payroll processing dropped 80%, from 2.5 days to half a day with no errors, and the team now saves about 30 hours a week on compliance.
HR Built to Serve a Bigger Mission
Whether a child needs help getting placement in preschool or a senior is seeking dignified care, Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona provides a vital lifeline to the people of the region. The organization supports everything from early education, eldercare and tax counseling to assistance for the hearing and visually impaired. Their mission? To help those who need it, when they need it and where they need it so that children, families and individuals can live with independence and dignity.
Casting a wide net of services to an even wider audience comes with many challenges, especially when it comes to employer compliance. The organization needed to optimize its human resources (HR) function to best serve its workforce and community. That’s why they partnered with isolved Optimization Services to better meet the needs of every stakeholder.
Diverse Services, Diverse Staff
With over 14 subcategories of services, Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona employs more than 300 professionals. The makeup of practitioners includes full-time, part-time, hourly, salaried and on-call employees, which makes fundamental tasks like processing payroll a massive challenge. To effectively run HR with such a varied group of employees, it takes organization and optimization.
When Heather Karp, executive director of HR, came aboard in February of 2024, she found that the HR function needed improvement. The organization was using isolved’s human capital management (HCM) technology, isolved People Cloud™, but not to its full potential. “My first thought was, we need an overhaul. We ran into challenges everywhere—our cost centers weren’t right, we had trouble running reports. Our previous payroll manager loved manual processes. We had to make some changes,” Karp said.
Optimization Services to the Rescue
Everything changed after a conversation with her dedicated relationship manager at isolved. “I was introduced to the idea of isolved Optimization Services. They helped us fix our HR foundation.” isolved Optimization Services helps customers extend the impact of their people strategies by closing the gap between their unique workforce needs and their use of isolved People Cloud.
One of the first things the team worked on was simply organizing tables, which had a ripple effect on the entire HR infrastructure. “The team fixed things like accruals for vacation time and holiday pay. Some of our staff work for the federal government, while some are state employees. They don’t always have the same holidays, for example. Now, things like accruals and permission groups are seamless and perfect. The Optimization Services team helped us get our processes in the right spot.”
Keeping Compliance
As a non-profit working with so many different groups of the population, the organization shoulders substantial compliance burden. “My entire first week was spent on an I-9 audit because of how bad our compliance was. We had an external team evaluate our compliance and our score was incredibly low.”
The Optimization Services team implemented certification tracking and automatic messaging to help Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona save time and maintain compliance.
“Now, with Optimization Services, we are saving about 30 hours a week on compliance, and we are much more compliant across the board."
Heather Karp
Executive Director of HR
Perfecting Payroll
When Karp started, processing payroll was a time-consuming endeavor, often riddled with errors. “Processing payroll used to be a two-and-a-half-day scramble. Now, with Optimization Services, we can process payroll in half a day, and we no longer have any errors.” With the help of isolved, the organization reduced payroll processing time by 80% and saved at least 20 hours per payroll cycle.
Reflecting on isolved Optimization Services, Karp marvels at how the team moved quickly, efficiently and with care. “The work the Optimization Services team delivered, and the efficiency they brought, made an immediate impact. They moved quickly, were highly available, and even scheduled off-cycle calls when we needed them. Their solutions are now integral to our daily operations,” Karp said.
