Providing staff parking is more trouble than it’s worth, right? It’s true that trying to manage workplace parking using traditional systems can be expensive, time consuming and inefficient. But the benefits of providing workplace parking, including improved staff retention and morale, are incredibly valuable, and for companies with tool of trade vehicles, it’s simply non-negotiable. For a multitude of reasons, workplace parking plays a significant and essential role in many Australian businesses.
But can managing workplace parking ever be easy? In a word, yes. Let’s look at the most common staff parking issues and how a smart parking management system like DIVVY can make workplace parking management a breeze.
Unused parking spaces
Workplace parking spaces are often allocated to particular employees, which means they end up sitting empty when people are on holidays, out at meetings or on sick leave. The rise of flexible working, with people working from home a day or two a week, has made this problem more pronounced than ever. It’s frustrating having lots of unused parking bays in your car park, especially when you have employees who would love to park onsite missing out.
That’s where a smart parking management system like DIVVY comes in. When an employee with an allocated car park knows they won’t be coming into the office, they can use the Free Up My Space feature on the DIVVY app to make their parking space available for other employees to book.
It’s a simple but powerful way to make parking available to more employees, which is great for morale while making sure your parking spaces are working as hard as they can. Find out how Downer Group used DIVVY’s Free Up My Space to get the most out of the parking spaces at their Sydney head office here.
The expense of leasing workplace parking spaces
Leasing car spaces for your employees isn’t cheap. A parking space in Sydney’s CBD can cost more than $800 per month, so you want to be sure that your business can justify every parking space on its lease.
You can establish your business’s actual parking bay usage with DIVVY’s staff parking management solution, just like Suncorp did at their Brisbane and Sydney offices. Accurate, real-time parking bay utilisation data, provided by DIVVY’s smart parking system using IoT, shows the patterns of usage in your car park. That insight can then be used to inform business decisions about how many car parking spaces you really need.
Thanks to DIVVY, Suncorp discovered they didn’t need as many car spaces as they had, and they were able to return significant savings to the business by reducing the number of parking bays they were leasing while still meeting their workplace parking needs.
Time consuming manual parking administration
Trying to manage staff parking the old-fashioned way, with physical parking passes and spreadsheets, can be a full-time job. It’s time consuming, inefficient and the room for error is enormous.
A smart parking system using IoT, like DIVVY, cuts out the heavy lifting of staff parking admin. Employees use a QR code on their phone to access the car park – no more physical access passes and unauthorised entry problems. Parking bookings are handled by the DIVVY app, not managed in an Excel spreadsheet. And there’s no need for separate visitor parking management software. Visitor parking is easily and simply managed with DIVVY’s Book on Behalf feature.
Sometimes staff parking management can become complex, with different groups of staff allowed varying parking access. With DIVVY, staff parking can be managed in highly flexible and nuanced ways by grouping staff members, creating different access levels for particular parking bays, and more, as Boral discovered at their North Ryde, Sydney office.
And for those businesses who wish to charge their staff (or some of their staff) for parking, DIVVY’s contactless parking payments systems can handle that too. No need for payroll staff to spend time manually deducting the cost of parking from employees’ pay packets. Staff pay for their parking via the DIVVY app and the payment is remitted back to the business every month.
Tax time reporting headaches
When the end of the fringe benefits tax (FBT) year rolls around on 31 March, calculating your business’s car parking fringe benefit obligations can be incredibly tricky. The ATO’s definition of a car parking fringe benefit, and when a business is exempt from paying FBT on car parking, are complex and depend, in part, on intricate rules around how long a parking space has been used on any given business day. The rules have also recently changed, meaning more Australian businesses than ever are now liable for FBT on car parking.
A staff parking management solution like DIVVY saves you from trying to make a guesstimate on your FBT car parking liability and may also save you money. Because the amount of FBT payable is based on how much and when a car parking space is used, accurate data about parking utilisation, like that recorded by DIVVY’s smart parking management system, may help reduce your FBT car parking bill. Even Deloitte Private agree that using DIVVY’s reports can, in the relevant circumstances, result in a reduction to the car parking FBT payable.
Looking for a way to make managing your workplace parking easier? We can help. Get in touch with our sales team to discuss your staff parking management needs today.
