Getting started
Moving off a whiteboard, a roster spreadsheet and a docket book feels like the risky bit, and it is a fair thing to worry about when payroll depends on it. So here is what actually happens, who does what, and how your existing information gets across.
What happens
OMBR is not sold self-service for this reason. An account is opened after a conversation, set up by us, and checked with you before anybody depends on it.
You do not start with an empty system and a manual. We create the account, load your plan, and configure the parts that are specific to you: your depots, your roles and permissions, and the rate cards you actually quote from.
Staff, vehicles and plant, clients, and your schedule of rates. If you can get it out of your current system as a spreadsheet, it can come in. We do the mapping, so you are not renaming columns to suit us.
Walked through the parts each person uses rather than a tour of every screen. The scheduler learns the allocation board, the estimator learns quoting and rate cards, the payroll officer learns the pay run and where the hours came from.
The field side has to be learnable in minutes, because crews change and nobody is doing a training day for a night shift. Sign on, prestart, photos, docket, sign off. That is the whole thing.
Book real shifts, allocate real crews, capture real hours, and see the pay run and the invoices come out the other end. We stay close through the first pay run and the first invoice run, because those are the two that matter.
Your data
Export what you have from whatever you run now: a scheduling tool, a payroll system, an accounting package, or the spreadsheet that has been doing the job all along. CSV or Excel is enough. We do the mapping, so nobody is renaming columns to suit us.
Names, contact details, roles, tickets and licences with their expiry dates.
Registrations, types, and what is attached to what.
Companies, sites, and the people who sign dockets.
Your schedule of rates per client, including day, night, weekend and public holiday rates.
Work already quoted or under way, so you are not starting mid-job with a blank record.
Tickets and licences are worth bringing in with their expiry dates attached. Once they are in OMBR, an expiry that would have gone unnoticed until the week of the job shows up while there is still time to do something about it.
Training and support
An estimator and a traffic controller need almost nothing in common from this system. Training them together wastes both their time.
Walked through the work each person actually does: quoting off your rate cards, building bookings, allocating crew and plant against availability, tracking permits, and running payroll and invoicing from signed dockets. Whoever does the pay run learns where every hour came from, because that is the question they will be asked.
Short, and on the phone they already carry. Sign on, prestart, site photos, hours, docket signed by the client representative, sign off. It has to be learnable in minutes rather than in a training day, because crews change and nobody is running an induction before a night shift.
We stay close through the first pay run and the first invoice run. Those two are where a new system either earns its place or does not, and they are worth having someone alongside for. Support is available monday to friday, 9:00am to 5:00pm australian eastern time, and you can reach us on 1300 662 747 or at support@ombr.com.au.
Keeping it safe
So it is reasonable to ask what happens to them. Everything below is what we do today. We do not hold a security certification, and we would rather say so than imply one.
Your operational data is hosted in Amazon Web Services’ Sydney region and encrypted at rest. That covers the database, uploaded files and evidence, backups and system logs.
Each customer works in a separate tenant. Access inside your account is controlled by the roles and permissions you set. Our staff reach customer data only where it is needed to provide support or fix a fault.
Everything travels over TLS. Passwords are stored as cryptographic hashes, so they are not readable by anyone, including us.
Significant actions are logged, so a change to a docket or a pay run can be traced. Backups are taken regularly and tested by restoring them.
The full detail is in our privacy policy and terms of service, including how long we keep things and who we disclose to. Both are worth reading before you commit, and they are written to be read.
Questions
Something not answered here? Ring 1300 662 747 or send it through. It is answered by the people who build the software, not a call centre.
A demo runs about thirty minutes. Bring a quote, a roster and last week’s dockets, and we’ll show you the same week running in OMBR.
or ring 1300 662 747