TEA Winner: Streamlining Payroll and Workforce Management
Organization Profile
- Industry: School District
- Location: Dunlap, IL
- Number of Employees: 900
- Students: 4,736
- Tyler Client Since: 2012
- Tyler Products/Solutions: School ERP Pro
- Tyler Excellence Award Winner: Performance & Innovation
Challenges
Located just outside Peoria, Illinois, Dunlap Community Unit School District (CUSD) serves a mix of suburban and rural communities with a strong focus on academic excellence and continuous improvement. Through the years, the district has grown alongside its community and is committed to serving students and staff. However, manual, paper-based processes in payroll and HR were creating significant inefficiencies at Dunlap CUSD. Payroll processing regularly took up to two weeks to complete, requiring staff to work overtime, including late nights and weekends. Reports were printed and stored manually, and payroll balancing was done using spreadsheets. “Everything was done on paper outside the payroll system,” said Payroll Specialist Jennifer Carroll. “There were nights when we would be here until midnight trying to close payroll. And I thought, ‘This is absolutely crazy. The system needs to be helping us, not making it harder.’”
The district initially implemented School ERP Pro, but due to shifting priorities and changes in direction, it wasn’t fully utilized. “The system was outdated,” said Payroll Specialist Hannah Rudolphi. Because they weren’t working in the system, it had not been updated or configured properly since its original implementation in 2012. Carroll noted, “Compared to working in municipalities and the private sector, I was shocked at how far behind we were.”
Solution
The district recognized the untapped potential of their School ERP Pro software and made a strategic decision to modernize their operations. They transitioned to a cloud-based environment, bringing everything current and unlocking the value they had invested in years earlier. The cloud migration allowed staff to access the system remotely and ensured automatic updates, reducing reliance on limited internal IT support. “We’re in a rural area with spotty internet,” said Carroll. “If my supervisor was traveling or our internet went down, there was no way to get into the system. Now, with the cloud, we can log in from anywhere, and we no longer have to worry about falling behind on our updates.”
Training was a critical component of the district’s transformation. “When I started at Dunlap, the system was not being utilized correctly,” said Carroll. “Hannah and I worked together to set up training and went to Connect. I knew we had to get things in shape so the system could work for us, not against us.” The team also collaborated with Tyler Technologies’ support staff to resolve system setup issues and optimize processes.
One major step forward was the implementation of Employee Access, giving staff direct access to payroll documents. “We made it clear to our staff — if you need your W-2s or payroll records, you’ll need to access them through Employee Access,” said Carroll. “We helped staff get set up, and the response was great — most people realized it was much easier than they expected.”
Training and support from Tyler led to several key enhancements in payroll processing. According to Carroll, the team gained a better understanding of the deductions needed for TRS and IMRF, Illinois’ pension and retirement systems. They learned how to identify errors before closing payroll and improved how they set up unionized staff. With this training and support, they streamlined payroll processing, mastered the rollover and year-end processes, and successfully transitioned the system to the cloud.
We realize we have a lot more work to do. However, we are so grateful for everything we have learned. We would not have been able to do it without all the help from Tyler.
Jennifer Carroll
Payroll Specialist
Results
Since implementing School ERP Pro in the cloud, the district has significantly improved payroll efficiency and accuracy. “Before we started on this journey, payroll used to take us about two weeks to close, and now we have it down to about three days,” said Carroll.
The compensatory time that once totaled nearly 600 hours is now gone. “We had 590 hours for comp time at one point,” said Carroll. “Now we don’t have any. We come in, get our work done, and leave on time — that was never the case before.”
Carroll also explained how timekeeping data now flows directly into payroll, and reports are actively used to catch errors before they become problems. “We’ve started reviewing system reports that we didn’t use before, and now we can catch and correct issues much earlier,” said Carroll. The team has also digitized contracts and eliminated many manual timekeeping tasks. “We worked with Tyler and our other software partners to automate our timesheets. Employees can now clock in and have that data feed straight into payroll. That has been a game-changer.”
Dunlap CUSD continues to invest in learning and optimization. “We’re just so much better off than we were when we started three years ago,” said Carroll. “We still have so much more to learn, but that’s why we go to Connect. We sit in these classes and learn these little tricks we didn’t know.”