National Basketball Association Team Miami HEAT Uses UKG Pro to Overcome Sports Team Payroll Challenges

LOWELL, Mass. & WESTON, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions for all people, today announced that the Miami HEAT, a member of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and manager of the FTX Arena, is using UKG Pro to administer its complex payroll and satisfy its reporting needs.

The Miami HEAT organization is responsible for the professional basketball team as well as year-round entertainment at the FTX Arena. Its employee base consists of salaried employees, hourly employees, commission-based employees, and employees paid per event. After going live on Pro, the HEAT took advantage of the solution’s configurability and detailed, out-of-the box reporting to automate its complex payroll obligations and maintain a lean payroll team.

“Pro is well designed for the sports industry,” said Rose Pearson, payroll director at the HEAT. “HEAT players, coaches, scouts, and the traveling staff work in multiple tax jurisdictions throughout the year. Pro is set up to automatically allocate earnings to specific states and cities, and to calculate pay accordingly. Pro also takes care of the tax reporting to those specific jurisdictions.”

Pearson noted that Pro’s ability to handle pay even includes complexity within job codes. For example, team dancers are paid a different rate depending upon the number of years they have worked for the organization, and they are also paid for specific appearances at parties or corporate events. Additionally, an individual employee can be paid a different rate for the same job depending upon the particular task.

“Without Pro, we’d be bogged down with manual, per-employee calculations, which would be time consuming, tedious, and not as accurate,” said Pearson. “Pro’s configurability enables the solution to do all this work for us. We can build the system to meet our needs, pay our employees how we want, and create reports based on our business goals.”

Pearson explained that Pro’s out-of-the-box reports compile the information the payroll team requires for each pay period, and that a library of special reports exists to facilitate the payroll team’s responsibilities beyond processing pay. These reports include generating monthly statements, preparing journal entries, and allocating pay to GL codes.

“Pro reporting makes my life easier,” said Carole Moncada, payroll manager at the HEAT. “You don’t have to be a technical wiz to build these reports since they are already available in the solution. You can easily modify them to fit your specific needs.”

Moncada noted that the HEAT’s UKG representative for people analytics is knowledgeable, responsive, and someone who can be counted on to turn a business objective into reality.

“We have an incredible team at UKG for all our support needs,” said Moncada. “For those rare times when our point person doesn’t know an answer, he or she will develop the right UKG resource for us. I can count on UKG to make time for me, and to show me how to get the job done. We have had this positive experience across disciplines: tax, analytics, configuration.”

“Professional sports teams in a variety of leagues are using Pro to solve the particular challenges of this industry, beginning with complex payrolls,” said Chris Todd, CEO at UKG. “We are pleased to see how our solution is making life easier for the payroll team at the Miami HEAT, with the system’s configurability allowing the HEAT to execute on its specific operational needs.”

Supporting Resources

• About the Miami HEAT.
• Read how UKG Pro Pay is helping to simplify the complex.
• See how UKG is making merger history by writing a growth story of success that will have a remarkable impact on people around the world.
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About UKG

At UKG, our purpose is people. As strong believers in the power of culture and belonging as the secret to success, we champion great workplaces and build lifelong partnerships with our customers to show what’s possible when businesses invest in their people. Born from a historic merger that created one of the world’s leading HCM cloud companies, our Life-work Technology approach to HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions for all people helps more than 70,000 organizations around the globe and across every industry anticipate and adapt to their employees’ needs beyond just work. To learn more, visit ukg.com.

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