For the nearly 400 City of Moose Jaw employees and the payroll department, an upgrade to their system is going to make a world of difference.

City Council has approved the expenditure of funds to pay for the system that will take payroll away from a manual card-based system and make it digital.

"We have had these difficulties with the system. They are real difficulties and they are concerning every time we produce a payroll and our system is needed as soon as possible. And waiting could just cause us to have a situation none of us want to be in."

The new system will cost over $70,000 to set up, but since the finance department has been planning for a replacement for years, no additional funding is required. There will, however, be a yearly fee of just over $65,000 that will be split between finance and human resources.

"What was nice to see was that there was going to be a much more open and informational relationship between the employee and the employer. Employees accessing the system can see their pay, see what they're putting in, they can see their balances on their various entitlements. They can also see their benefits."

Right now, most of the payroll is done on the old style recipe cards and adds hours of work to what is an automatic process in many businesses nowadays.

The new system also has some perks.

"Reporting and analytics are also present in the system. This allows for a lot of different features and abilities to do things that we can't do now in our system, including benefit administration, budgeting costing, and employee demographics, which right now we aren't able to produce with any kind of efficiency, or sometimes at all."

Campbell told councillors that managers often spend hours to try and track all the employee movements - and considering there are upwards of 400 employees, that's a lot of wasted time.