Position Control and Traveling Staff

#Business Read time:
Time tracking. 

It’s one of the greatest expenditures in a district, and one most susceptible to fraud and waste. Each hour adds up, and in the case of traveling employees (think school nurses, psychologists, social workers, long-term substitutes, coaches, even teachers) tracking their time spent at each building or site in the district can be a tedious process when done manually.

Position control affects board members, administrators, school business officers, staff, and even parents. 

Whether employees punch in and out at each location or are exempt, each school they visit is sharing the budget allocation for their time. The business office will want to be very exact about the expenditure for each school. This all feeds into the position control, budget, and forecasting for the district. As good stewards of the community’s district budget, the more exact the allocation, the better.

A manual, paper-based process for tracking this information is costly. Rather than focusing on filling the carefully deliberated positions, HR is tied up with data entry. The less time HR pros have to make solid, careful hiring decisions, the more the precious budget is funneled into training a new employee who may not be the right fit. Better to keep the data entry to a minimum, so people can focus on the important, impossible-to-automate tasks.

So what does position control look like in a robust school ERP system? 

Documentation

As roles change throughout the years, perhaps associated positions shift from part time to full time, or vice versa. Track these changes and keep the records attached to the position, along with the description, the number of people assigned to this position, which sites are relevant to the position, where each position’s salary comes from, and so on.
 

Budget forecasting

Once a position is documented and the system has all the relevant information, the budget for the following fiscal year can be more accurately forecast. Tying the different types of positions to the budget forecast helps account for up to 85% of a district’s budget dedicated to salaries. Without strong position control documentation, specific to each site visited, the budget cannot be accurately allocated.
 

Scheduling

The position record contains the common schedule for each employee assigned. This may be a 12-month schedule, a 9-month schedule, or some other configuration. It needs to be the same for each position record.


All this relevant data goes into the careful allocation of funding for each position—a part of education budgeting subject to intense scrutiny. The more school business offices can automate the collection and distribution of that data, the better. This looks a lot like the ability to easily close or duplicate positions, update position details quickly, and act as swiftly as possible to fill vacant positions. This gives school HR offices the power to remain compliant while accelerating and polishing the hiring process. Imagine the impact on school culture from the minute a candidate applies.

The unique nature of school districts means positions will often be shared across buildings—depending on the size of the district, this adds up to major budget impacts. 

Position control and ERP solutions streamline the process using technology to free up the moments of human connection crucial to making strong hiring decisions.

Follow-up resource: Forecasting budgets

Peer into the future with predictive analytics. 
 
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