Seven hundred employees, and a payroll system that could not report.

The situation

A long-established nonprofit provides employment to disabled workers, almost entirely through federal set-aside contracts. It employs roughly seven hundred people across a large number of them. Two things happened at once: a reorganisation aimed at streamlining operations, and a payroll provider that had stopped meeting the program’s reporting requirements.

The second problem is the one worth understanding. Set-aside contracts of this kind carry real-time and mid-payroll reporting obligations that most commercial payroll platforms are not built for. A provider that cannot produce them is not merely inconvenient — it puts contract compliance at risk, and no amount of goodwill from an account manager fixes an architecture that was never designed to do it.

What we did

BRG was brought in through a consultant already working with the organization. We built the reporting obligations into the criteria before anything else was scored, then ran an RFP to several targeted national PEOs against that standard. This is the part buyers most often get backwards: a requirement that a provider either meets or does not meet belongs at the front of the process as a gate, not in a weighted matrix at the end where a strong score elsewhere can quietly outvote it.

The outcome

The selected PEO met the real-time and mid-payroll reporting requirements the previous provider could not, and allocated a full-time analyst to the reporting work plus an on-location HR director to run the department. With that support in place the organization was able to streamline its existing administrative function, which produced savings of $550,000. A further $200,000 came from the stronger payroll and technology platform and from the compliance risk the PEO assumed and shares.

A second phase, adopting the PEO’s benefits and retirement program, is expected to add $250,000 in annual savings. We report it as a projection because that is what it is.

The uncomfortable part

The largest single number here came from consolidating administrative roles. That is a real consequence and it belongs in the open rather than behind a phrase like “operational efficiency”. It was the organization’s decision, made inside a reorganisation that was already underway, and the PEO relationship is what made it survivable — the work still had to be done, and it moved to a provider with a full-time analyst assigned to it. Anyone reading a savings figure of this shape should ask where it came from, and we would rather answer the question than have it asked.

If this resembles your situation

The tell is a reporting obligation that your provider satisfies through manual effort. If someone assembles a report by hand every cycle because the system will not produce it, you do not have a reporting process — you have a person, and the exposure sits with you the moment that person is unavailable.