Fluctuations in labor can cause a multitude of problems for your billing department. Either your employees are struggling through the busy weeks when payments are flooding in and you are understaffed, or employees don’t have enough work to keep them busy during the slow middle weeks of the month… that lull between payment send and payment due dates. This makes scheduling difficult for business leaders in your water department, but digging deeper, how are fluctuations in labor affecting your employees’ morale, and how can specialized water payment solutions fix that?
1. Borrowing Employees from Other Departments
When checks are coming in faster than your employees can process them, an easy fix to get the work done faster is borrowing employees from other functional areas in your water department. Although this is a simple solution for business leaders, it’s not as easy for employees making the switch. Employees that are pulled from their jobs to help out the billing department return to a mountain of work and end up days behind schedule. Falling behind in their own work in order to help another department is stressful for these borrowed employees. This sort of strain can cause resentment towards their peers in the billing department, and even their leaders for putting them in this difficult position.
2. Budgeting and Interdepartmental Conflict
Borrowing employees can also cause confusion within the finance department when it comes time to hand out employee paychecks. For borrowed employees, whose budget does their paycheck come from? The billing department or the employee’s department of origin? This discussion can cause conflict between department leaders because departmental budgets are limited, and neither party wants to use their budget towards work completed for another department. Furthermore, it’s important for any business to keep accurate financial books, and borrowing employees from another department makes it difficult to record their work.
3. Stressed and Discouraged Employees
Finally, for the employees who regularly work in the billing department, getting overloaded with checks to process twice a month is stressful, and adding new employees sporadically who are unfamiliar with the process can actually slow them down when they have to teach the borrowed employees what to do. Then, in the middle of the month when the water department isn’t receiving many checks, employees in the billing department have less work and may feel undervalued and underutilized. These inconsistencies are frustrating for employees, and it can make their job less enjoyable when they’re either stressed or jaded. So how can water department find a happy medium for their employees?
Digital Accounts Receivable, or Stub and Check Payment Processing, is a solution that can help water billing departments process checks in a fraction of the time, and create consistency for their employees. F&E Payment Pros has specialized water payment solutions, including stub and check processing for Accounts Receivable solutions. Learn more about our check imaging processor and other unique water payment solutions.