Revamping Employee Entitlement Payments with Alteryx: A Case Study on Grant Thornton

Grant Thornton is a global business advisory, tax, and audit firm that identified a market need for payroll assurance services in New Zealand. The firm initially built a model for one of New Zealand’s largest cleaning companies, covering 21,000 employees and 6 billion rows of timesheet data. However, the complexity of the entitlement definition in the Holidays Act made the architecture and model performance challenging. To address these challenges, Grant Thornton collaborated with Mission Intelligence to develop an Alteryx Analytic App that could navigate the constantly changing leave entitlement legislative landscape and be deployed at scale for organizations of all sizes.

Grant Thornton, a global business advisory, tax & audit firm, identified a need for payroll assurance services in New Zealand, where the government has complex and progressive employee entitlement laws. With a workforce of nearly 3 million, tracking and ensuring proper compensation for various leave scenarios is a significant challenge. Since the implementation of these laws in 2003, payment miscalculations, payroll code inconsistencies, and human errors have been prevalent. Grant Thornton initially built a model for one of New Zealand’s largest cleaning companies, covering 21,000 employees and 6 billion rows of timesheet data. However, the complexity of the entitlement definition in the Holidays Act made the architecture and model performance challenging, limiting them to process only one week at a time for each employee over their employment period. The first iteration of the three bespoke models took 3.5 days to accurately process calculations.

To address these challenges, Elisha Nuttall, Sr Manager, Consulting at Grant Thornton, and James Martin, Founder of Mission Intelligence, developed an Alteryx Analytic App. This app was designed to navigate the constantly changing leave entitlement legislative landscape without having to rebuild the calculation logic from scratch for each new client. The app had significantly more functionality and flexibility than earlier models, allowing it to be deployed at scale for organizations of all sizes. The innovative app architecture can now recalculate a single employee in seconds, or complete large recalculations of tens of thousands. The app model includes 42 different leave scenarios with 12 different configuration options, providing flexibility and agility to meet various types of employees’ working patterns. The model also includes two additional sublayers for client policy parameters and user configuration for customizability.

• The Alteryx Analytic App developed by Grant Thornton and Mission Intelligence has revolutionized the process of recalculating employee entitlements in New Zealand. The app's flexibility and scalability have made it a unique solution in the market, capable of handling the complex legislative landscape of employee entitlements. The app has significantly reduced the time and cost associated with recalculating entitlements, making it an affordable solution for all organizations. Furthermore, the app's ability to handle a wide range of leave scenarios and configuration options has increased its agility and adaptability, making it a comprehensive solution for all types of employees' working patterns. The success of the first version of the app has led to the development of an enhanced second version, which covers all aspects of employee entitlement legislation in New Zealand and includes nearly 150 possible leave scenarios.

• 6 billion rows of timesheet data processed with one model
• 90% reduction in data processing time
• Significant cost reduction to clients