Financial Services

Saving Claimer tens of thousands in IT admin

Claimer team picture
Website
Industry

Financial services

Zelt features used

Leave Management

Payroll

Device rental

 

Claimer is a London-based startup that simplifies the way SMEs can make R&D tax claims and access government innovation incentives.

Applying for tax credits, grants, or other local tax reliefs can be a difficult process that requires specialised knowledge SMEs do not have.

Claimer’s vision is to become the interface between SMEs and government incentives and provide businesses with an easy way to claim the right ones.

Adam McCann, co-founder and CEO of Claimer, needed a fast and efficient way to manage HR, payroll and company IT to reduce overhead on the team and keep everyone focused. To achieve their vision, the Claimer team needed an efficient solution for their people operations team and that was easy to use for employees.

They were looking for a platform that would help them manage devices, run payroll, and streamline HR, thus enabling them to focus on the business.

Operational challenges

Spending too much time on HR, payroll and hardware

Before Zelt, the team was relying on a traditional HRIS, outsourced payroll and spreadsheets to manage IT, which created frustration and slowed down the team.

Broken hardware was causing employees to be out of action for long periods of time, and the overhead for device management was incurring unnecessary costs. Leavers returning laptops with activation lock meant the COO regularly had to visit the Apple store in person to reset the device, wasting dozens of hours each year.

Both admin staff and employees had a sub-optimal experience with payroll management. The lack of automation was leading to human errors, which could take a long time to fix. Additionally, payroll was sometimes late and caused some team members stress.

The team needed a one and done platform that would enable them to manage everything with ease: salaries, pensions, time off, and devices, so they chose Zelt.

Adam founder of claimer
Adam McCann
CEO and Founder

Zelt solves most of our HR operations overhead so we can focus on building the business and have a better employee experience.

Security requirements

Seamless ISO 27001 compliance

Adam was looking for a reasonably priced, automated and reliable employee platform that would also work with their ongoing ISO27001 certification and its requirements for device and access security.

While browsing around for a solution for these challenges, he came across Zelt, which impressed him with its wide variety of features for employee administration across both HR and IT domains. As the team started to look more into Zelt, they were surprised to find device management, payroll, absence management all in one easy-to-use product.

Zelt has helped the Claimer team streamline HR and IT operations, reduce much of their operational HR overhead, and seamlessly secure their employee computers in line with ISO 27001 requirements. And, most importantly, free up time to concentrate on building the business, rather than on the day-to-day minutiae of admin and IT.

Integrated MDM

Fast efficient mobile device management (MDM) to eliminate downtime and unavailability

“HR and MDM are two major systems that need constant attention for a team of even 25. This means at least weekly tasks. And two systems means double the overhead, which is what we were looking to avoid. ” says CEO Adam, who is a software engineer by trade.

With Zelt’s integrated MDM (mobile device management) functionality, employee devices and company systems like Google and HubSpot are seamlessly protected from unauthorised access, without any overhead on Claimer’s CTO.

Equipment

No more employee downtime due to equipment delays or damages

Tara Livesey, Claimer’s Chief of Staff was particularly impressed with the speed and efficiency of the deployment and management of employee laptops.

With Zelt’s next day delivery, no employee has had any downtime due to damage or unavailability ever since. “And with Zelt’s affordable device rental option, we could afford to give new joiners a much nicer, brand new device” she points out.

Zelt now acts as a “dashboard for employment at Claimer”, which empowers employees by giving better visibility into their time off, pay, equity, benefits and easy access to the tools and equipment they need for their work.

For employees, getting an account in HubSpot or a new laptop is now much faster than before because managers can approve with a single click in Slack and Zelt automates what would have taken several emails and manual actions to complete – and as a result gets pushed back down the priority list of managers.

Onboarding

Onboarding time reduced to minutes

Onboarding a new employee is much faster with Zelt: It now takes minutes instead of hours. Zelt has helped Claimer improve the employee experience because each new hire now has a work machine ready to go before they start, enabling them to get up to speed and start contributing to the team quicker.

Effortless device and account security

Once they got their first devices deployed, the Claimer team realised how valuable Zelt would be for them in terms of security, as well. The first Zelt-delivered MacBook had all the security applications pre-installed and its rent and management were both reasonably priced. The variety of features in one place made Zelt the right solution to Claimer’s previous challenges.

photo of tara livesey
Tara Livesey
Chief of Staff

Being able to onboard new employees end to end in one system has been incredibly helpful. Previously, we used to spend a of time organising equipment, creating contracts and setting up emails and benefits. Now, we can do this all within a few minutes.

Cost savings

Savings of tens of thousands of pounds in admin overhead

With the adoption of Zelt, Adam estimates that Claimer has saved tens of thousands of pounds on admin hours that previously went into device management and payroll.

On top of being an easy to use software for admins and managers, the adoption of Zelt has also contributed to improving onboarding and the employee experience.


“Without Zelt, monitoring and/or managing key information and resources for myself and my team would be much more manual and time-consuming. It’s a dashboard of my employment with Claimer where I can view and update details, access resources like my salary, pension, holiday and get access to company systems like Notion or HubSpot when I need to. Seeing other relevant info (like colleagues’ time off) is also helpful for the day-to-day execution of my role.”

Martin Delaney, Growth Manager at Claimer


Key Takeaways

Zelt has helped Claimer

Results

Saving time, money and pain

With the adoption of Zelt, Claimer achieved a number of goals inculding

  • Save tens of thousands of pounds in admin overhead
  • Streamline and speed up employee onboarding
  • Improve the employee experience
  • Improve the security of their devices and facilitate their management

On top of being an intuitive software for admins and managers, the adoption of Zelt has also contributed to improving onboarding and the employee experience.

Onboarding a new employee is much faster with Zelt: It now takes 10 minutes instead of one hour. Zelt has helped Claimer improve the employee experience because each new hire now has a work machine ready to go before they start, enabling them to get up to speed and start contributing to the team quicker.

Once they got their first devices deployed, the Claimer team realised how valuable Zelt would be for them in terms of security, as well: The first Zelt-delivered MacBook had all the security applications pre-installed and its rent and management were both reasonably priced. The variety of features in one place made Zelt the right solution to Claimer’s previous challenges.