About Tweed Shire Council

Tweed Shire Council is the local governmental body for the Northern Rivers district of the same name in New South Wales, Australia. The Council covers 70 regions and is host to some of the largest development projects in NSW. They’re also responsible for environmental control, including bushland management and regular flooding.

Over the years, the Council has also put considerable planning efforts into Aboriginal cultural heritage sites and reclamation projects, along with their ongoing environmental and property planning management.

“The fact that the application is device-agnostic is excellent.”

Updating old habits

Tweed Shire Council had a manual timesheet coding and data entry system, with approximately 350 hard copy timesheets to manage. The process of coding and entering timesheets used to take three employees around three and a half days each.

The other significant problem was collecting hard copy timesheets and leave application forms, a process which relied heavily on supervisors updating and advising on the status of an application. Payroll would then have to work through a sizable pile of leave forms to find the right one in time.

Clearly, the Council’s old system wasn’t working. The arrival of COVID only sped up the need to reduce physical contact as much as possible and replace the process with something that could be managed practically in isolation.

The TimeFiler approach

TimeFiler was brought in initially on the promise that they could remove the Council’s paper trail problem. While we were able to work very closely with the client, much of the process was achieved remotely. In order to not disrupt the Council’s whole system, a controlled onboarding process was deployed to test with a small group first and slowly deploy to everyone else. This allowed us to refine TimeFiler to suit the Council’s needs, seeing how they used the cloud application.

The end result

The final outcomes were very easy to quantify. The number of enquiries in relation to leaving balances and applications was reduced by 75% because timesheets were no longer getting lost. Significant efficiency gains were made throughout, and refinements were made to involve setting up additional features, including user accounts, licencing, app installation and profiling. Supervisors and employees could also now view any application's entire past, present and future status, a great improvement over the old paper system.

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