Husband and wife team Eric and Betty Jankelowitz began the Gauteng Wage Bureau, or the Industrial Wage Bureau as it was known in those days, some 40 years ago. Today the company still supplies payroll outsourcing services.
 
Accsys is celebrating 25 years of service to the HR and payroll industry. The Gauteng Wage Bureau represents the companys longest running client service relationship.
 
It is an honour and a very proud moment in our development to acknowledge the contribution made by the Gauteng Wage Bureau and the many years of loyal custom and beneficial interaction we have experienced. It is fitting that this company joins us in celebrating more than twenty years of solid business and professional service and delivery, comments Teryl Schroenn, MD at Accsys.
 
The bureau is quick to point out that 40 years ago the processing of salaries and wages was vastly different to the way it is done now. Founding member and former owner, Betty Jankelowitz, reflects on how the two companies first came into contact with each other.
 
Going back to the old days before computers, we started with a Kinzel bookkeeping machine, which had stops for columns for tax, UIF etc, Janks reminisces. These columns had to be added, cross-casted and coined - for that we employed comptometer operators. Wage clerks were employed to do the calculations from the clock cards, strippers to strip the slips that had to be stapled on to small brown pay packets. Then there were ledger cards for each worker and that had to be added up so that at year-end the tax receipts could balance with the payments.
 
Needless to say, they often did not balance, cards went missing, and totals were wrong. At that time of the year extra staff were employed, and they worked around the clock. Tax receipts were hand-written and then had to balance.
 
These machines eventually aged and became outdated and the company switched to National cash machines, Which cost an arm and a leg each, Janks quips. Employees had to be encoded on a ledger card with a magnetic strip down the side and the comptometer operators now became one person who worked the machine.

There again we had mishaps, Janks points out. A member of staff once put a big batch of cards on the machine and it got hot and all the work on the magnetic strip was wiped off! So once again we worked through the night re-adding and re-encoding the cards but the wages were on time the next day.
 
Computers became the next rage, but that technology was beyond the reach of Gauteng Wage Bureau. So we found a firm with a computer who would run our work for us. We sent inputs to one firm who put it on tape and then sent it to the company who processed it. We sometimes sat waiting for our work for days... the computer was down, the other firm had not sent the tape, they could not read the tape. Everything came back in big cases it then had to be sorted and stripped. It was still a very arduous process. What a nightmare... until Accsys walked in one day, says Janks.
 
Sheenagh Tyler from Accsys was part of the original team that called on Gauteng Wage Bureau. The company had just got a payroll system and wanted to test it out on our clients, explains Janks. Ours was the first company to run an Accsys system.
 
Quentin Chilvers, MD of Gauteng Wage Bureau, takes up the story: Twenty-six years ago, Hun and Pauline Stodel from Accsys, together with former support director, Sheenagh Tyler, approached the bureau with a newly developed computerised payroll system. They promised it would take all the nightmares away. During the installation of the Accsys Payroll Manager, lack of sleep seemed to be the norm for staff who supervised the smooth transition to the new Accsys system.
 
Fortunately, adds Chilvers, the Accsys payroll system proved to be easy to use and results far exceeded expectations.
 
Again, it was Accsys that proved to be pro-active during the Y2K transformation in ensuring that the Bureau was Y2K-software compliant and there were no glitches during the transition.
 
Of course, a business relationship is never complete without the team who make it happen and, of the original staff, nine are currently still employed. Amina Raffie and Shirley Myles, now with us for 38 years and 36 years respectively, agree that the Accsys Payroll System came just in the nick of time, allowing them to enjoy the finer things in life, adds Chilvers. The Gauteng Wage Bureau now has an excess of 120 clients.