Sønstebøtunet Shopping Centre

Sønstebøtunet started out as a small shop 90 years ago. Since then, it has developed into a shopping centre covering 7,500m2 of floor space. We are a complete retail destination, with outlets to meet the whole family’s needs. Everything from sports equipment, groceries, wines and spirits (Vinmonopol), clothes for all occasions and everything you need for the home.  All the concepts are operated by one and the same organisation, locally, by us.

We are a shopping centre with a difference in the heart of Bø town centre. Just five minutes by car from the amusement park Bø Sommarland.

Welcome to a great shopping experience with us.

The challenges

We have a lot of departments and different stores that we both do the bookkeeping and run the payroll for. The system we used to have was extremely dependent on individual people and therefore very vulnerable. If someone was off sick, the entire process ground to a halt. We used a mix of timesheets on paper and Excel spreadsheets, which we had to chase up and badger people for. That took up a lot of our time. Manual work plans and staff plans were also drawn up using Excel. With employees working here and there in numerous departments and stores, the process was cumbersome and provided little oversight or control.

I was searching for a way to do all this electronically in order to eliminate the vulnerabilities in our processes and increase operational efficiency. We looked at a lot of systems, but did not find what we felt we needed. Then we contacted Timegrip, after talking to the Eurosko chain, which was very satisfied with their system.

Timegrip’s process was extremely interesting. We told them what we needed and felt immediately understood.

Timegrip had almost everything in order, particularly the ability to work seamlessly in different departments, correct registration of employee hours worked and the automatic allocation of costs to the right cost centres in payroll and accounting systems.

Since implementing Timegrip, we now spend a fraction of the time on the payroll than we did before.

And perhaps more importantly, our departments can now take responsibility for all hours worked.  This is an opportunity they have seized with both hands, and they are doing a phenomenal job, both with staff scheduling and hours. It’s almost as if it has become a sport; they are more conscious of running their own departments, with the opportunity to solve their own problems.

We have been using Timegrip for a while now. Timegrip provides even greater value through comparisons between historic figures and budgets. It all becomes so clear, and that has saved us salary expenses, there’s no doubt about that.

Timegrip app

The mobile app has involved the employees in the stores’ operations in a completely different way than before. They are now always fully up to date about when and where they are going to be working. The employees are perhaps the ones who are most satisfied with it. They clock in in one department and clock out in another. It works great. They find it really useful not having to write out their own timesheets. It’s very convenient.

The Timegrip Standard service gives us a great deal of flexibility. The service can be tailored to our way of calculating salaries. Allowances, overtime and breaks are all calculated extremely accurately.  I’m very pleased with that.

Timegrip Standard is easy to learn and easy to use. I bought a half-day training course with a Timegrip instructor for all our employees here on site. The instructor knew her way around the system, understood how we operate and was adept at tailoring the message to the different roles and user levels in our organisation.

The whole system works well, flows very smoothly and enables us to devote our time to other things.

Anita Storhaug, Finance and Payroll Manager, Sønstebøtunet Shopping Centre