Trusted to get it right: how Joan Parkes modernised HR and Payroll at Fine Décor
TL;DR? Here’s the summary:
Fine Décor Wallcoverings, a UK heritage wallpaper manufacturer with 100+ employees, replaced spreadsheet-heavy HR processes and a legacy payroll system with Cezanne HR software and Cezanne In-House Payroll Software. For Joan Parkes, the company’s sole HR lead, the results have been clear.
- 250+ admin hours saved across the year.
- Payroll processing time more than halved, from about 10 hours a week to 4.
- 100% employee adoption for absence management and self-service.
- 6 HR spreadsheets retired.
- Reporting time cut from over an hour a week to 5–10 minutes.
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Meet Joan Parkes. Joan runs HR for Fine Décor Wallcoverings. There’s nothing unusual about one HR lead for an organisation of 106 people, but what’s less usual is what Joan has achieved in the space of a year: taking Fine Décor Wallcoverings from paper and spreadsheets to a fully digital, self-service people operation, all whilst studying for her CIPD Level 7. Here’s how she did it with the help of Cezanne.
Paper-based holiday cards and a heavy reliance on one person
Before Cezanne, if a manager wanted to know who was off, or an employee wanted to check their leave balance, there was only one person to ask: Joan.
“ We used to just have a payroll system, and I kept everything else on spreadsheets. Holiday requests were actual paper cards, and the approval was also just a paper slip.”
The problem went well beyond HR. Different teams were managing things like TOIL and working from home in completely different ways, leading to inconsistency and a lack of visibility for managers, leaders and HR. Joan had wanted a proper HRIS for a while, and with Fine Décor needing to replace its payroll system anyway, the opportunity to modernise HR too was a no-brainer.
Why did Fine Décor choose Cezanne?
Every organisation has different needs. For Joan and Fine Décor, the brief was simple: “We needed something that worked off the shelf, was nice to look at and easy to use.”
For Joan, it really was a Goldilocks moment. Some HR systems felt too complex, others poorly suited to a workforce with limited tech-confidence. Cezanne was “just right”, winning on accessibility, practicality and value. And, once Cezanne was locked in, it was time to meet the Cezanne Implementation Team and get started.
Implementing an HR and payroll system as a team of one
How do you even go about implementing a full HR and payroll system as a team of one? For Joan, that meant implementing the HR system first and coming back to implement payroll later in the year.
Cezanne trains you to implement the system yourself, a style of implementation that really suited Joan. “I’d have my meeting with Charlotte (One of Cezanne’s Implementation Consultants), then I’d go away do my homework and get that bit done, I found it quite easy.” A training-based approach meant Joan was able to make it her own along the way too. “I started changing the names of screens to adapt things to what we needed. I was able to create my own occupational health monitoring screens, which I can run reports on, too,”
“We rolled out Cezanne team by team, which helped a lot. It meant any little issues could be fixed before moving to the next team. Whilst it meant taking a little longer, it meant I could give more time to each new team.”
Payroll came next
With the added complexity of setting up both weekly and monthly pay runs, it took a little extra patience to work through everything and get payroll up and running. “It’s so important to get it right. If the data’s not right in the HR system, it’s not as critical, but with payroll, it’s why people come to work, you can’t get it wrong.” Commented Joan.
It’s fair to say that the payroll implementation wasn’t all plain sailing, but Joan and the Cezanne payroll team worked through it together to build a system she could trust. That trust is now what Joan values most. “It’s not as mentally draining to run payroll now that I know when I am running payroll, it’s accurate.”
What changed by switching to Cezanne?
- 250+ admin hours saved across the year.
- Payroll time: from about 10 hours a week to 4.
- Self-service: 100% of employees now request leave in Cezanne, and 79% of managers use it for key processes.
- Spreadsheets: 6 HR spreadsheets retired.
- Reporting: from over an hour a week to 5–10 minutes.
- Paper holiday cards and approval slips: replaced by digital requests that don’t get lost.
- Return-to-work form completion: up from 66% to 78%.
Before Cezanne, almost everything HR went through Joan. And now? “The system does it, I don’t have to sort of get involved as much now”. Line managers now own and manage their team’s leave, employees can check their own leave without waiting for a reply, and better yet, when Joan is away, everything continues as normal.
What’s next for Joan and Fine Décor?
Joan recently attended her first Cezanne customer event: Cezanne Roadshow in Manchester, where she joined 40 other Cezanne customers and staff to learn, network and build relationships with the Cezanne team. Part of the day is for customers to showcase how they’re using Cezanne:
“One of the ladies shared how they manage their timesheets, It was brilliant! There are all these things that we can do that I hadn’t thought about. I’ve been looking at how we can introduce some the things that were shared here too”.
Now that the core HR, absence management and in-house payroll systems are in place and running, Joan is turning her attention to other areas for improvement and exploring which other modules to implement next.
If you’re running HR largely solo, still leaning on spreadsheets (or worse, paper!) then Joan’s story is proof that change is faster and easier than you’d think. To see how Cezanne could help make you an HR hero, book a demo today.
