INDUSTRY

Transportation

SOLUTION USED

WinPAY

COMPANY PROFILE

One of the oldest transport companies in Canada, D. Donnelly Inc. was established in 1867, and has been a cartage contractor to the shipping public over the last hundred and thirty five years.
The transportation of dry bulk cargo is the company’s primary business. With its headquarters in Vaudreuil, Quebec, D. Donnelly operates round the clock, 365 days a year, primarily in Ontario and Quebec. The company specializes in transporting by “bulk B trains”, trucking with one tractor and two trailers – a far cry from the 300 horses put to service in the 1920s!

CHALLENGES

Over the years, trucking has evolved into a highly regulated industry in Quebec. Calculating truckers’ payroll has become particularly complex. When Brian McGrath acquired D. Donnelly Transport in 1992, the payroll was being done manually. It took 10 hours a week to produce the pay. “We used to finish Wednesday evening just in time for the Thursday payroll.” Management eventually decided to outsource the payroll to a service provider.

“Our experience with the pay service was not a good one”, explains McGrath. “The time we were spending on payroll actually increased – to 15 hours a week. Our payroll seemed too complex for the service, and we spent an awful lot of time checking the pay and correcting errors. We also began to question the wisdom of having the pay service handle our DAS remittances. Paying up front for remittances due only weeks later was proving to be very costly.”

After a couple of years with the pay service, McGrath decided it was time to bring payroll back in-house. His accountant recommended McGrath contact ORANGE Digital Systems.

ORANGE DIGITAL SYSTEMS’ SOLUTION

With nearly twenty years of experience in the payroll field, ORANGE was well positioned to supply D. Donnelly with a solution that would quickly and accurately calculate employees’ net pay. In addition, its system was able to comply with all the complex deduction and reporting requirements established by the trucking industry.

Fast forward to 2005. Donnelly’s paymaster, Tracey Thompson, now spends less than an hour a week running the company payroll with ORANGE Digital Systems’ payroll solution. The complexity inherent in their payroll remains – drivers are paid according to mileage, the type of truck combination driven, the presence or absence of a load, and numerous other criteria. D. Donnelly uses more than 50 pay items within the payroll. Moreover, the industry-specific reports produced by the new system are invaluable to the company, particularly the complicated Driver’s Pension Report and the monthly Labour Standards (“Normes du Travail”) report that all Quebec trucking companies are required to produce; both are particularly time-consuming to calculate manually.

Brian McGrath adds “When we implemented ORANGE’s payroll system years ago, the trucking industry was undergoing many changes. It didn’t take us more than a couple of months to realize that our new payroll solution was giving us new-found control and functionality while bring our costs way down – all vital in the much more competitive industry that was emerging.”