How Responsive Analytix helped Linaker build a Joblogic reporting dashboard that automated payroll calculations, eliminated paper timesheets, and freed two full-time positions.
“Their help was crucial in digitising part of our timesheet process, which freed up two full-time positions in our accounts team and increased our engineers’ productivity. He also created management reports that are used at board level every month.”
Jennie Davies, Performance Director, Linaker
The Client
Linaker is an engineering maintenance business with a £25m turnover, 200+ employees, and over 3,000 client sites across the UK. Engineers operate across seven regional bases delivering heating, cooling, and electrical services.
The Situation: Getting Useful Reporting Out of Joblogic
Linaker came to us in 2023 with a specific problem: calculating engineer overtime was slow, manual, and error-prone. Engineers recorded their time in Joblogic, the field service management system, but overtime was still calculated from paper timesheets — a process their accounts team spent significant time on every pay period.
The expectation was that we would connect Joblogic to Power BI and automate the calculation. That was the brief. What we found was more complicated.
The Constraint
When we started mapping the business rules, it became clear that Linaker didn’t have a fully documented set of payroll rules to work from. Contract terms varied across teams. Overtime thresholds differed by employment type. On-call periods needed separate treatment. Some engineers had bespoke arrangements that weren’t captured anywhere centrally.
The data itself had its own issues: open jobs that should have been closed, overlapping time entries, gaps in on-call availability. None of this was anyone’s fault — it reflected the normal complexity of a business that had grown without a formal data foundation.
Before we could automate anything, we had to help Linaker understand and agree their own rules.
Building the Joblogic Reporting Dashboard
We ran a workshop with the operations and accounts teams to work through the business logic. This surfaced the real requirements: how to handle non-productive hours, how to apply travel time within overtime calculations, how to flag anomalies for manual review rather than let bad data flow silently through to payroll.
The resulting rules were complex — but they were agreed, documented, and owned by the business. That was the foundation for everything that followed.
We built a structured data warehouse to consolidate data from Joblogic, payroll spreadsheets, and on-call rotas. The architecture handled multiple validation stages to catch data quality issues before they reached calculations. Anomalies were flagged automatically so team leaders could fix entries in Joblogic before the next processing run — a feedback loop that improved data quality over time.
The Joblogic reporting dashboard was built in Power BI: operational views updated daily for payroll purposes, and a strategic reporting layer for management with weekly and monthly visibility across overtime, travel time, engineer performance, and workforce productivity.
What Changed
The immediate outcome was a reliable, automated overtime calculation — accurate, consistent, and no longer dependent on paper timesheets. But the impact went further than that.
Two full-time positions were freed in the accounts team. Engineers experienced more consistent, accurate payments — reducing disputes and improving morale. And for the first time, Linaker’s leadership had board-level reports they could rely on, updated without manual intervention.
The engagement also opened Linaker’s eyes to what else was possible in their data. Beyond payroll, we developed analysis combining engineer time data with fleet movement and HR records — giving management a richer picture of workforce productivity and operational efficiency.
Results
- Two full-time positions freed in the accounts team
- Payroll automation replaced a manual, paper-based process
- Board-level management reports produced monthly, automatically
- Data quality improved through automated anomaly detection and feedback to operations
- Engineering workforce visibility extended to cover overtime trends, travel time, and performance
“Responsive Analytix opened our eyes to the possibilities within our data. The information he helped us access allowed us to make informed strategic decisions we couldn’t make before.”
Jennie Davies, Performance Director, Linaker
Is manual reporting slowing your operations down?
If your team is spending time on processes that should be automated, or making decisions from data you don’t fully trust, we can help. Book a free discovery call to talk through what’s possible.