Sapphire Accounting uses Zoho Flow to nearly triple weekly onboarding capacity

About the company

Sapphire is a UK-based payroll and accountancy business specializing in the temporary labor market. They offer services for recruitment agencies who connect workers with assignments through their clients. Sapphire employs and manages the payroll for these workers, ensuring each one is paid accurately and on time, every week. Sapphire supplies services to over 500 recruitment agencies, mainly in the UK, with a growing global arm.

Automating the onboarding process

Every new worker used to be onboarded on a 10-minute call, with a staff member collecting their details and typing them into a previous CRM. Onboarding therefore relied on manual effort, resulting in the staff: contractor ratio becoming a challenge. This limited the total onboarding per week to 300 due to the constraints around the process.

Adding to that, Sapphire's old CRM was slower in moving between modules, making the onboarding experience inconvenient for the contractors while also needing extensive manual intervention from their staff. So they decided to move to Zoho CRM. But while the experience was much better for them, they still had to move data across different apps. That's when they discovered Zoho Flow.

The previous 10-minute onboarding call was replaced by a self-serve online form powered by Zoho Forms, so workers could fill in their details on their own time. Once the form was submitted, the details were captured in Zoho CRM and the rest of the actions happened automatically using Zoho Flow.

"Our weekly onboarding count went from 250 to over 600, increasing our efficiency by more than double. In the three months after launching the online forms, thousands of workers were onboarded with no dependency on staff availability at all."

William Mah Soon Yoong, Business Change Consultant, Sapphire Accounting

Routing everything that happens when a worker goes live

The first flow Sapphire ever built is the one they still call the "live flow", and it remains the most important. When a worker goes "live" and is ready for payroll, many things have to happen at once, and each of them depends on who the worker is, which agency introduced them, and what their arrangement involves.

A webhook from Zoho CRM initiates the flow. The flow fetches the relevant record, which might be a UK or global assignment, and sets variables from what it finds. Then the variables go through a long series of decision blocks. Based on the path, the contractor, the agency, and the relevant internal teams receive the right documents and all parties are informed of any actions required at the right time using custom functions.

The flow also includes an error branch that captures conditions that shouldn't occur, such as a record ID being absent. These errors are caught early and routed to the relevant department, rather than surfacing later as a broken customer journey or failing silently.

"This workflow, built extensively with webhooks, decision branches, and error handlers, is the single biggest time saver we have, saving us over 100 hours per week."

William Mah Soon Yoong,Business Change Consultant,Sapphire Accounting

Benefits and ROI

Sapphire has automated hundreds of processes on Zoho Flow over three years, across more than 200 individual flows. The roadmap is driven from inside the business: Anyone who spots a process worth automating raises a ticket through a module the team built, and the functions and flows get created accordingly.

"Zoho Flow has been transformational for us. Moving from 250 introductions a week to over 600, the main difference has been transforming someone's painfully mundane task to one that is performed automatically. This has saved over 5,200 hours of manual work/year and £70,000/year for us."

William Mah Soon Yoong, Business Change Consultant, Sapphire Accounting

he metric the business puts most weight on is contractor conversion, which has moved from 78% to 84% on average over three years. On their volumes, that's worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. They're also saving at least 5,200 hours a year of manual work and over £70,000/year on staff costs.

Moving forward

The team has a roadmap of processes to automate and build on Zoho Flow. They're also reworking existing flows to ensure they're updated with the latest processes.