What do you get when, almost overnight, close to half the country starts working from home? Among other things, a lot of trash. For Don Doidge, Head of HR & IT at Trash Butler, that meant having to rapidly grow his team of field staff (‘butlers’) to keep up.  

It’s a task, he says, that would have been infinitely harder had they still been using their previous platform. 

“We’d basically hit a wall with Paylocity—they couldn't scale with us,” Don said. “They just weren’t well-suited to our type of setup, and that resulted in constant issues with payroll and onboarding.”

Trash Butler sought a modern, flexible platform that could meet its short and long-term needs.

To increase their chances of finding the right solution, Don enlisted both third-party HR consultants and members of his own team for guidance. 

“To hear my entire team of subject matter experts say, ‘We've used them all, and Rippling is the best choice,’” Don said, “and then rally the rest of the organization… that was incredible.”

And Don came to quickly understand the high praise. “Rippling is just so much more thoughtful than any other system we’ve worked with before,” he said. “It’s very forward-thinking, and brings really powerful features and capabilities in such a simple and intuitive package that practically anyone can use them.”

The Trash Butler team saw significant time-savings from Rippling’s simpler, more streamlined onboarding process.

“Paylocity would send multiple welcome emails to new joiners—one to welcome them, the next providing a username, another to let them know their password was coming,” Don recounted. “With so many emails, our new joiners would get lost—especially those who don’t really check their email.

“We’d lose days sometimes because they didn’t know how to start onboarding or they’d lost their passwords.”

It also meant Trash Butler’s recruiters spent about 30-45 minutes of each day following up with new joiners or resetting their passwords.

“With Rippling, we’ve been able to avoid that entirely,” Don explained. “Now, new joiners get just one email that says here's your offer letter, click here, enter your password, then sign in and complete your paperwork.”

And that simplified onboarding process has also resulted in an unexpected but welcome benefit—fewer new joiner ‘ghostings’ (the situation in which a candidate would simply stop engaging with Don and his team after receiving their offer).

With a faster, more intuitive onboarding process, they simply had fewer candidates abandoning the process halfway through or losing track amid multiple onboarding emails and instructions.

One of the key ways Rippling helped the Trash Butler team speed up their onboarding was with its customized onboarding paths. Previously, the team would onboard employees, only to find later that there was an exemption or vehicle requirement that had been missed. That meant they’d need to go back to the employee for more information or to correct the mistake.

Today, Rippling automatically triggers the right paperwork and onboarding flow based on the job we’re hiring them to do. That’s made onboarding faster and more accurate, and saved our team an enormous amount of time.

As Head of HR & IT, Don’s responsibilities range from recruiting to benefits administration, to coaching and talent development, and more.

And to execute on those responsibilities as effectively as possible, he believes in the importance of having good, reliable data to base decisions on—something he didn’t feel he had with his previous solution.

“I have a lot more confidence in the accuracy of our reporting now than I did before,” Don explained.

Another thing Don appreciates: how much more intuitive it is to build reports from scratch in Rippling. “With Paylocity it was a lot more work. The UI was very dated, and to add new fields you had to know the exact terms Paylocity used, or it was impossible to find. We ended up building one massive report with every field we could possibly map, then manipulating it outside the platform.”

“I also like how easy it’s been to share reports with the rest of my team in Rippling, and the specific control I have over what information gets shared and with whom.”

With Paylocity, Trash Butler felt hamstrung by the limited number of integrations available to it. And on top of that, the team was not particularly helpful with Trash Butler’s efforts to build integrations with key partners.

“With Rippling, when we have a partner we want to bring on, we get a response usually within a few hours, or a day or two at most,” Don said. “With Paylocity, it would take months of constantly following up, without much result at the end.”

Running payroll is also significantly faster, dropping from several hours to less than one to process pay runs across 50 states.

A lot of that comes from the ability to now link payroll to multiple cost centers, which has meant no more time wasted with manual report exports and VLOOKUPs. Now, Trash Butler administrators can import data directly into Quickbooks with Rippling’s Quickbooks Online integration.

Besides the time savings, being able to attribute their employee hours to the right cost centers has also meant more accurate profit and loss tracking.

“We have over 500 work locations across the US. Rippling’s ability to support that has been a big win for us,” says Don.

For Don and his team, the implementation process with Rippling was a huge contrast to what they’d had with previous vendors, including Paylocity.

“We went into our implementation with Rippling feeling like it was more of a partnership, right from the start,” Don described. “We agreed on a clear agenda and timeline of everything we were going to accomplish, and the team was always available to answer any questions we had along the way.”

And unlike most providers, the handoff throughout the process was incredibly seamless as well. “From the sales team to our implementation managers, and from our implementation managers to our current dedicated Customer Success and Technical Account managers, we didn’t have to rehash what we’d done with the previous team, or what our goals and objectives were. They just knew.”

“With Rippling, we honestly feel like we have somebody that's looking out for our success as much as we are internally.”

Rippling has also been invaluable to Trash Butler from a compliance perspective.

“Today we operate all across the US, and making sure we’re compliant with the requirements of each state, especially when it comes to our field team, is a challenge,” Don explained. “Thankfully, Rippling’s helped make that easier.”

Currently we’re using Rippling’s Time & Attendance offering, which has a number of features that help us keep compliant, depending on the state the employee is in. For example, our field team in California gets automated reminders when they have to take compulsory breaks, and they then have to go into the mobile app and certify that they’ve taken them.

• Sharp reduction in onboarding: 75% of Trash Butler’s new joiners complete their paperwork in 72 hours or less.
• Less ghosting: Before Rippling, Trash Butler lost 55% of candidates during onboarding. Since Rippling, that number dropped down to 43%.
• Support at scale: Rippling supports Trash Butler across 500 locations nationwide.