This article ran in the TMEPA Newsletter on February 4, 2021. Click here to visit their site!

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed what normal life looks like for many people. Part of this new normal includes office closures and employees working from home, requiring new tools to complete the same daily tasks.

For many HR and payroll professionals, there are large parts of employee interaction that require processing paperwork. Tasks like changing dependents, direct deposits or W2 withholding information, along with benefit enrollment, can require a lot of paperwork changing hands or a lot of manual data entry.

NISC’s recently-released iVUE Connect – Financials solution has helped NISC Members better navigate the pandemic by providing a true employee self-serve experience that gives employees access to their own data and makes manual processes more automated.

“During the pandemic, with so many of our employees working remotely, we really found that iVUE Connect – Financials saved us,” said Cindy Layne, CFO & Vice President of Finance for Middle Tennessee Electric. “We have over 500 employees now, and we pay them bi-weekly, and we only have one full-time payroll person, so you can imagine this efficiency is extremely important to us.”

For Middle Tennessee, allowing employees to make changes to their personal information added a great deal of value by creating efficiencies in their human resources (HR) and payroll processes and enhancing security.

“It’s eliminated paperwork and reduced security concerns about transmitting the paperwork,
Layne said. “It has also substantially reduced manual entry by our HR and payroll teams, decreasing manual entry errors, and it’s created a great audit trail for us.”

One challenge on the minds of many HR and payroll employees is benefit enrollment, a process that for many relies heavily on submitting paperwork and manual data entry. These processes may not work as well for those at home during the pandemic, and iVUE Connect – Financials helps automate and simplify the enrollment process.

“Employees selected their own options, reviewed them themselves and then it was automatically added to the correct payroll period,” said Caseina Mixan, Sr. Manager of Human Resources at Great Plains Communications. “We did have to do some review since this is the first time we’ve used the system, but going forward, it’s going to save us a lot of time and a lot of data entry.”

Employees also have access to view other data like their available time off and other important information like pay history.

“How much (time off) do I have? How much am I accruing? Those are always big questions,” said Tucker Lemley, Vice President of Finance and Administration for Peace River Electric Cooperative. “All of that is so much more visual. Easy access to pay stubs when you’re not at the office is a big deal. Everyone needs a pay stub when they’re at home working on loan paperwork or other things of that nature, and they can get those pay stubs or W2s without being in the office.”

iVUE Connect is NISC’s persona-based enterprise platform that can be accessible anywhere, anytime with an internet connection. The persona-driven design puts the highest-priority functionality front and center with an enhanced, user-friendly design.

“It’s just quicker, easier and less likely to make a mistake,” Lemley said. “You don’t feel the need to have checklists for every little thing that you do. It looks like something you should be using in 2020. As bad as 2020 has been, this has been good for us to have. We’re excited to see where NISC takes it and some of the new personas.”

If you would like more information on iVUE Connect – Financials, please visit nisc.coop/ivueconnect or reach out to NISC at ivueconnect.sales@nisc.coop.