Ideal system for collating wages across dozens on sites?

Good Afternoon,

I wonder if someone here might be able to help, but I help run a business in the UK. We're a contractor so we have people employed on dozens of sites across the country. Every fortnight the site managers send in the wages of their guys to our head office. These then get added to wage spreadsheets which are then manually inputted into our payroll software.

For now this is working fine, but we're currently trying our best to expand and the future is pretty bright in that regard. What we don't want is to get bogged down with lots more wage files that all need to be manually inputted into our system by one person.

Now there is a way to import a csv file into opera 2 (the software we use), but it requires a very unintuitive format that we can't really ask the regional managers to stick to. Which means there'd be a lot of copying and pasting involved, with some google spreadsheet formulas to jig things about. This is still a lot of work every fortnight.

Instead, I was thinking of setting up a website, with an SQL database that the managers could input into directly. They can be checked, authorised and the required csv file produced. I would need to be able to produce this system myself (I have a math degree with some basic sql and php knowledge and can learn more without too much hassle), since nobody else here has the technical know-how. I can't hire anyone else or any companies to do it for us as we work in a very competitive industry and so money is always tight.

Am I thinking along the right lines, or am I way off?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Nishido

Sounds like a plan...except I'd take it one step further. I'd have the actual workers input directly into the system - Managers approve it and main office finish.

I have a part time "freelance" job where I do what I just mentioned. They have it setup where I submit a "job." They have it setup so that the manager gets an email notification. The manager approves it (I get an email too) then I go back in and submit an invoice which someone higher up gets and approves. Then the accounting department ends up with an invoice waiting to be paid.

Great thanks. I would love to go further like you say, but unfortunately this is the contract cleaning industry, which means most supervisors and site managers are cleaners that have been promoted, and therefore aren't too good with the whole "technology thing" as they say. Just asking for an email address for them is comical as it is ><

Thanks for the advice though :]