“In Singapore, May Day (or Labour Day) is celebrated on the 1st of May each year as a mark of solidarity amongst workers. The celebration of May Day as a public holiday began only in 1960 after the PAP came into power. Before then, only workers defined as such under the Labour Ordinance 1955 and those defined as industrial clerks under the Clerks Employment Ordinance 1957 were given paid holidays.” *wikipedia
As you might be aware, effective April 4th 2015, the new minimum wage for non agricultural workers in Philippines has raised from P451.02 a day to P466 (+P15.00 COLA) a day. (Source: DOLE)
We received a great email today from one of our clients in Cebu, Philippines. House of I.T. is an Australian BPO that have been on the PayrollHero platform for quite a few months now. Its always great to receive emails like this. If you have a BPO in the Philippines and want to learn more about how we can help, just contact us.
“Before discovering PayrollHero our company was using a manual timekeeping biometric system and then generating reports manual reports that we could use in Excel for our payroll needs. It was manual, full of errors and required a lot of oversight. 
We are an Australian BPO company with clients across Australasia, US & Europe with 70+ staff in our Philippines office. Founded on the principles of providing superior professional expertise and comprehensive solutions for our clients complete IT needs, we offer a full range of IT development, implementation and maintenance services; including a secure and proficient network design, successful systems integration, effective project management and installation of technologies, right through to pro-active and reactive desktop support. We specialize in IT services but also provide an excellent support for SEO, website designing, architecture, website hosting, and data entry, as well as internal projects to support our own growing business.
Editors Note: This is another post by Kieran Peppiatt, Head of Client Success at PayrollHero. Due to the overwhelming interest in our new Xray Insight pages he put together this post that explains the business intelligence that you can glean from PayrollHero.
With the launch of our new Xray Insights app we get a lot of customers asking us about what analytics we currently have on offer so I thought I share what is currently available. That said, we’d love to hear what you want to know about your employees. We are constantly looking at ways to improve this area of PayrollHero and would welcome your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below.
Here individual employees can see their own attendance for the current month. They can also view their overall ranking in the company and their correlation on specific dates against the company averages.
On this page you can see your employees overall ranking within the company. This is done by early, lates and absences.
You can also see a leaderboard of the employees with perfect attendance.
Here you can see how things like the weather and commute distance affect your company’s attendance. Do more people come in late when it’s cloudy, or do people call in sick when it’s raining? Here you can see if weather has any correlation with your employee’s attendance
You can also see how the commute distance of your employees affects their punctuality.
Xray insights is available for iOS devices. It is designed for company leaders who need a quick snapshot or insight into how their company is performing. The app is currently in beta and the reason for this is because we are looking for feedback from our clients on what snapshots they would like to view. If you’re management, leader or company owner please tell us the sort of information you would like to be able to view from your company in the comments below.
We speak to a lot of HR people and business owners and one thing they want to know is what their average employee looks like. With the overview page of Xray insights you can see that in an instant. It tells you what percentage of your company is male/female, the average gender, age and tenure of your employees.
Ever wondered who is working at your worksites right now? Sometimes it’s good to know where your people are. Being able to get quick insight to if one of your branches is under or overstaffed is invaluable. With the staffing levels page on Xray Insights you can do exactly that.
Just like the attendance feed in the app you can get the same information straight from your phone. We really appreciate that running a business can lead to a hectic lifestyle and your not always in front of a computer. We wanted to make sure that you can access the information that is important to you where ever you are.
Ever wanted to know which of your employees were doing a great job? Customer feedback lets your customers give a thumbs up any employee who wows them. You can then view the leaderboards to see who your customers love or who you might need help get ridiculously customer focussed! The rankings for this are viewable via the Xray Insights app.
Daily Pulse
Ever wanted to get real feedback from your employees that isn’t biased or based any single employees opinion. Daily Pulse allows you to take measurements from your “crowd” of employees. Currently you can find out which employees are rated well by their peers. We will be introducing the ability to ask your own custom questions shortly.
For more information please contact us at support at payrollhero.com
Interested in PayrollHero? Sign up today and get 90 days free! – USE PROMO CODE 90ATMBP2018
Many foreigners come to the Philippines and ask the same question – what Philippine ATM bank machine should I use to take out money? The question comes up often as the banks charge a fee for foreign cards being used as well as the foreigner’s local bank will charge a fee. So finding a bank with the highest withdrawal limit is important so that the fees can be minimized as best as possible.
Here are the results for Philippine bank ATM withdrawal limits:
| Bank | Max. Amount |
| BDO | ₱10,000.00 |
| PNB | ₱20,000.00 |
| BPI | ₱20,000.00* |
| HSBC | ₱50,000.00 |
| UnionBank | ₱20,000.00 |
| EastWest Bank | Customizable |
| Maybank | ₱20,000.00 |
| ChinaBank | ₱30,000.00 |
References:
BDO Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
PNB Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
BPI Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
HSBC Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
UnionBank Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
EastWest Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
Maybank Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
ChinaBank Philippine ATM Limit (reference)
Update: A commenter gave some feedback on BPI.
If this was helpful, you might like this:
– How To Get To Fort Bonifacio (From The 4th Worst Airport In The World)
– Why Start a Business in the Philippines?
We have made some changes to the attendance review page so that it shows exactly what is happening with a certain employees attendance. Has it been resolved? Were they absent? What time did they clock in and out? Now it all shows up neatly in a single screen for you to review. (see above)
Also, we added that same level of detail to the employee side. Now employees can log into their personal PayrollHero accounts and see what happened with their clock in and out, if infractions have been resolved, holidays, etc. (see below)
If you have any questions feel free to contact us by responding to this post in the comments or emailing support at payrollhero.com.
Do you want to learn more about your company?
Do you want to have real time business intelligence in the palm of your hand?
Who was late today?
Who is currently at a certain location?
Which employee gets the most “likes” from customers?
There is so much to see about your business using PayrollHero’s Xray Insights iOS app. You can download the newest version here and sign into your PayrollHero account. It is an awesome way to get real time data from your payroll software.
Editors Note: Introducing Vincent Paca, Adventure Engineer at PayrollHero. He will be contributing to the PayrollHero blog from time to time.
Not so many months ago, a talkative fellow wandered in my small Cebu office by chance. Dressed in shorts, flip flops and a black shirt with a man in a red cape. Turned out that was Mike Stephenson, CEO of PayrollHero. He talked about adventure, learning, teamwork and improving one’s self and the next thing I knew I was on a plane to Manila two days later to pair with a few of their engineers. A little under a year and here I am, in Singapore, busting out a blog post about the adventures and misadventures of Adventure Engineering.
Adventure engineers often travel depending on the client’s need. We go wherever we can be more effective at our job. Being ridiculously client focused, as we always say. (yes, we are hiring)
One of the things that we wanted to try out this year was to partner up with 3rd party engineering teams to help us increase our velocity. In comes AgilityIO, a 150-strong engineering team based in Da Nang, Vietnam. We believe that a lot of problems can easily be solved when you’re in the same room together with your team. Making the communication loop so much shorter meant making things move faster.
At the beginning of April, Adam, Mike, Piotr and I decided to meet up in Da Nang, Vietnam to personally meet and work with team Agility. Adam, and Mike flew in from Singapore, Piotr arrived from Whistler and I catapulted all the way from Manila.
Getting to Da Nang is no simple task. Flying from the Philippines meant that I had to take a flight to either Hanoi or Saigon, then take another domestic flight to central Vietnam. I landed in Saigon around 12am bags in hand waiting for my next flight at 5am. DO NOT fly at these hours. Saigon domestic airport closes at night and the earliest they open is at four in the morning. I had to stay outside of the building and wait for it to open. Fun times indeed. I arrived in Da Nang around 6:30am. Being in Vietnam also meant that we had to wake up an hour earlier. Our daily huddle always happens at 6:47am GMT+8 and no, it doesn’t matter where you are.
I downed a can of RedBull and a shot of Cà phê sữa đá and headed to AgilityIO’s office with Piotr. Agility has a HUGE office in Da Nang, 5 floors of mobile and backend developers, it seemed like they had it all. We knew from the start that this wasn’t going to be a breeze. Communication and getting your thoughts across was definitely a challenge, but we didn’t let that wall stop us from where we’re going. We’re now two weeks into the project that we’re working with Agility and we’re almost near completion.
A selfie with some of the Agility team in the background
Da Nang wasn’t all work and no play. We went for a food tour around Da Nang at lunch time. Summer from Funtastic Food Tour took us around Da Nang to its secret foodie gems scattered all around the city.
The next day we hopped in a cab and ventured to Hoi An. Our first stop was the Marble Mountains. The Marble Mountains is a cluster of mountains made of, you guessed it, marble. Going up one of the mountains wasn’t that difficult. Partly because the local government attached a modern elevator to the side of the mountain that takes you up halfway of the mountain.
(Adam, Piotr, Mike and myself)
Scaling the peak wasn’t all that bad either. All that marble makes for perfect steps when crawling up to the peak.
We just made it in time for lunch at our hotel and just enough time to prepare for our motorbike tour around the countryside of Hoi An. This was the very first time I learned how to ride a motorbike and surprisingly enough it wasn’t that bad. Vuong took us around the scenic countryside of Hoi An, we rode on floating bridges, elevated bamboo bridges and along the rice fields. Exhilarating and enjoyable, the whole 5 hour ride was quite the experience.
Finishing at 7pm left me little time to prepare for my 9pm domestic flight to Hanoi to get to Manila. Even though I left Vietnam a bit exhausted with mud on my shoes and a little bit of dirt here and there, I had a really great time. 10/10 would definitely do again.
Want to read more about our Adventure Engineers? Check out Nico’s story from when he left Manila to work from the Whistler office while getting his Canadian residency.
Interested in joining our team? We are always hiring!
What is an Adventure Engineer?
Editors Note: Introducing Adam Baechler, Product Manager at PayrollHero. He will be contributing to the PayrollHero blog from time to time.
(L – R) Michael Stephenson, Kiro Harada, Adam Baechler, Stephen Jagger, Piotr Banasik, Nico Suria and Vince Paca)
On April 14th I was fortunate enough to attend Kiro Harada workshop on Improving Scrum with Kaizen in Singapore. Kiro is an Agile coach and is super knowledgeable of agile principles and methodologies including Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and Kaizen. Kiro was also kind enough to stop by our office and give us a brief introduction into how he use Domain Driven Design (DDD) within his teams. You can find Kiro on Facebook or LinkedIn. (Kiro was gracious enough to visit the Singapore PayrollHero office the next day to do a private session with our team)
I been practicing scrum for about 3 years now so I found the discussions about Kaizen and Domain Driven Design from the last couple of days the most interesting. So I thought I would share quick summary.
Disclaimer: I’m new to this and I have yet to implement any of these teachings. So please do seek out the advice of experts like Kiro.
Kaizen
For those who have not heard of Kaizen, it is a methodology for continuous improvement. Surprisingly the Kaizen didn’t originate in Japan but in the United States during WW2.
The core principle is to make your work easier and safer.
When applying Kaizen to a process you can think of it in 3 phase; Fix the leaks, Make it flow and finally Create a new process.
Fix the leaks first. When you are working and you notice a process is not producing the desired results. Slow down or even stop so you can inspect the process. Focus on effectiveness not on efficiency. The goal here is to creating constant value from your process.
Make it flow. Now that your process is creating value constantly we want to make it flow by increasing efficiency without sacrificing the quality of your output. A great way to do this is through E.C.R.S. First try to Eliminate steps from your process. Next try to Combine some steps together. Next try to Rearrange steps in the process. Lastly, try to Simplify individual steps in your process. Never try to go faster in this process by following E.C.R.S you should accelerate naturally.
Once your process is flowing smoothly you should feel your work is easier and safer. Now is the time to dream up a new process that will deliver better quality and value.
As a scrum team we follow similar actions of inspect and improve through our retrospectives. however this is only done at the end of our sprints. I hope that our team can adopt the principles of Kaizen to apply continuous improvement throughout our sprints.
Domain Driven Design (DDD)
We only had a short introduction here but in that short time we saw the huge value of Domain Modeling. Domain Modeling is a great way to visualize your products domains, decide how they should interact and test out your logic before you build it out extensively.
At PayrollHero we are going to try to use the Domain Modeling technique to identify the Domains of our applications to create a better system architecture.
Thanks for reading. Drop any questions you have in the comments below.
(Some photos from the day with Kiro)
Editors Note: Introducing Maita Ocampo, Business Development at PayrollHero. She will be contributing to the PayrollHero blog from time to time.
Wait What?
Overwhelmed, confused, and highly emotional – these are not the end of day emotions that I’ve imagined my first day with PayrollHero to be like. Apparently, I found myself having dinner alone in a restaurant after my first day and my thought bubble said something like: WHAT. JUST. HAPPENED.
Looking back, I think it was just “info overload” on my end. Haha! Well, to be honest, technology is not really my area of expertise. However, one of the reasons why I took the job at PayrollHero is because I knew that I was ready and up for the challenge. Getting sent to visit the team in Singapore after a month and working directly with the co-founder is of course, a plus. Boom! The opportunities are endless.
(Myself with Steve Jagger, Michael Stephenson and Adam Baechler in Singapore checking out the view of the Marina Bay Sands.)
First Three Months
My first three months were more of getting accustomed to the tools, getting to know the product, and catching up with the company and our timelines. Now that three months have passed, I couldn’t be thankful enough for PayrollHero and its founders for giving me the opportunity to be part of a platform that aims to make the lives of employees and their respective companies better. This is something that really excites me!
Non-Stop Learning
Let me share with you 3 key learnings from my first three months with PayrollHero:
Exciting Times Ahead
I guess, no matter what your job is, your first couple of days at work could really be a nerve-racking experience so it’s important for one to focus and have the proper mindset for it.
What I enjoy the most about working for PayrollHero is that everyone’s contributing and thinking of ways to achieve better results for our clients while enjoying the process. We get to learn a lot from each other too!
(Myself with Cristian Guerrero, Kieran Peppiatt, Stephen Jagger, Adam Baechler and Mike Stephenson at the Hyatt in the City of Dreams Manila)
As we’re expanding rapidly in the Philippines and have soft launched in Singapore, I am looking forward for the next countries that we’re targeting this year to become payroll live and the adventures that come along with it. Exciting times, indeed!
Want to read more about our Adventure Engineering lifestyle?
– You might like Nico’s story about his first few days in the Whistler office after leaving the Philippines.
– Adventure Engineers scatter
– Looking to join us? Check out our hiring page or how our work from home program works.