Tag: staff parking

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The latest from CEO Grant Fowler: March 2021

DIVVY Parking's CEO, Grant Fowler

If 2020 was a bumpy road, 2021 is shaping up to be the highway leading towards better days. Here in Australia, we continue to handle the coronavirus threat remarkably well. Our vaccination campaign is underway, consumer confidence is bouncing back and economic predictions are looking good.

The pandemic hastened the uptake of experience-enhancing and margin-increasing property technology or proptech, among the Australian property industry. The Property Council of Australia surveyed 216 industry professionals in November and found that 55 per cent are enhancing their existing technology systems in response to COVID, and 27 percent are investing in new systems.

You can read more about DIVVY’s latest proptech products, Drive-Up and Check-In, in this update.

Drive Up with DIVVY

We’ve all had days where we’ve forgotten to pre-book our parking. That’s why we launched Drive Up casual parking. It’s everything our customers love about parking with DIVVY – cashless, ticketless, contactless and above all, easy – but without the need to book in advance.

We partnered with Enacon Parking to install Drive Up at their Bella Vista car park in December. It’s a busy open-air site next to Norwest Private Hospital and CircaRetail Shopping Centre.

We’ve had great success with two Drive Up products at the site, starting with Pay on Entry, where visitors are charged a set all-day rate as they enter the car park. Pay on Exit is now installed at the site, charging drivers at the car park exit a fee based on the duration of their stay.

DIVVY Drive Up replaces a pull-ticket and cash payment system at the Bella Vista site, and is already saving Enacon five hours of cash collection, ticket refill and maintenance labour per week, not to mention the cost of the paper tickets.

Drive Up is coming to more locations across Sydney soon, so keep your eye out for DIVVY Drive Up parking near you.

Parking is the hot ticket in 2021

Have you seen our fresh new website?

Many people have returned to workplaces after spending most of last year working from home, and lots of them are avoiding public transport and looking for parking instead.

Our new website was launched at just the right time in October last year. In the first two months of 2021, our website traffic and user sign ups have been at record levels, with site traffic up more than 100 per cent at the same time last year.

Check out the new staff parking case studies or technology page for yourself!

Check In with DIVVY

As Australia adjusts to the latest version of the new COVID normal, we’re evolving our proptech too. Our Queuing and Contact Tracing platform was designed to last year to help businesses (including Woolworths) communicate to customers their busiest periods and days and in-store wait times.

Now we’re developing Check In, a visitor management solution using DIVVY QR code technology to check visitors or staff into a business’s premises. Check In can be used for contact tracing purposes, or to maintain a record of personnel on site at any given time, and is designed to meet the needs of the business now and into the future.

Get the most out of your staff parking

Find out how the TOGA Group reduced their overheads while supporting their staff through the pandemic with DIVVY Enterprise’s staff parking management system.

Contact Us

The DIVVY team is always here to help. For more information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.  

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News

Fringe Benefit Tax changes are coming to the parking

Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT)-Employers, don’t get caught out by FBT changes

There is a prospective change coming to fringe benefits tax (FBT) and car parking. The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has prepared a draft taxation ruling that proposes to treat any car park that offers all-day parking as a commercial car park for FBT purposes. 

This is even if the car park’s fees are so high as to discourage all-day parking. Under that definition, shopping centre, hospital, airport and university car parks could all be considered commercial car parks.  

Businesses whose staff parking facilities are both in the vicinity of the workplace and within one kilometre of such a car park may now have to pay FBT on the taxable value of employees’ car spaces, where previously they did not. 

Any business that provides employees with car parking but is currently exempt from FBT on that parking needs to assess whether these changes will impact them, and make that assessment sooner rather than later. 

Businesses in areas like Sydney’s Macquarie Park and North Ryde, home to car parks associated with Macquarie University and Macquarie Centre shopping centre, will potentially be impacted by these changes. 

Local transport management association Connect Macquarie Park & North Ryde is helping to educate their members about the prospective changes. Some of these businesses may be liable for thousands of dollars in car parking fringe benefits tax for the first time, and it is important that they determine now whether their liability is going to change.  

The prospective changes have the potential to affect any business in Australia within a kilometre of a shopping centre, airport, university or hospital car park. Those in areas like Melbourne’s Carlton and Parkville, with their plethora of car parks associated with the University of Melbourne and RMIT, could be affected. 

Businesses in Eagle Farm, Hendra and Nundah within a kilometre of the numerous Brisbane Airport parking facilities should assess whether they will be impacted by the changes. Organisations in proximity to Adelaide’s largest shopping centre Westfield Marion and its car parks, need to do the same. 

If businesses determine now that they will be affected by the changes, they can get ahead of the game and invest in smarter parking technology that can save them money at tax time. The ATO calculates how much FBT is payable on a car parking space based on its utilisation.

If a business can show, with thorough, accurate, real-time reporting, that utilisation is low – perhaps whilst their employees are working from home, for example – they can reduce their FBT liability. To be able to demonstrate this when FBT is due, businesses need to put the smarter parking systems in place now. 

For a few years now, DIVVY has been working with Connect and several Macquarie Park and North Ryde businesses, including Downer, Boral, Novartis and DXC Technology, to help them get the most out of their car parking and other bookable assets.  

Even our existing clients might not know that DIVVY’s fringe benefits tax reporting has been given the thumbs up by Deloitte Private, who acknowledge that using DIVVY’s reports can, in the relevant circumstances, result in a reduction to the car parking fringe benefits tax payable.  

The ATO’s final ruling is expected later this year and the changes will take place from April 2021.  

Car parking fringe benefits tax change is almost certainly coming, so make sure you take those proactive steps now. 

This is general information, and we recommend that you seek professional taxation advice relevant to your circumstances.  

For more information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.  

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Case Study staff parking

How Suncorp used DIVVY to save costs and help their staff during COVID-19

Employees or Workers in Suncrop office

Businesses everywhere have been faced with all manner of extraordinary challenges as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc around the world. When restrictions came into force in Australia at the end of March, Suncorp turned to the DIVVY Enterprise parking management system to help them navigate the complex and rapidly changing situation.

Suncorp, one of Australia’s largest financial services brands, has relied on DIVVY Enterprise to manage the onsite parking for their fleet of trade vehicles at their Brisbane and Sydney offices since 2018.

In late March 2020, Suncorp was one of many Australian businesses to transition as many of their employees as possible to working from home. Even so, there remained a core group of essential staff who needed to continue to work from the office.

At a time of heightened social restrictions, Suncorpwanted to help their essential employees avoid commuting via public transport. The onsite parking at their Brisbane and Sydney premises, usually allocated to their tool of trade vehicles, was offered up to their essential workers.

Suncorp were also quick to lease additional off-site commercial parking to ensure they were able to meet the parking needs of their essential staff.  

The essential workers had not had access to Suncorp’s onsite parking before COVID-19. The sudden change to Suncorp’s parking usage meant an entirely new cohort of parkers had to be onboarded into the DIVVY system very quickly, so that they could access the car parks.

Over the course of the lockdown period, Suncorp would add more than 100 new users to the DIVVY system.

Because the DIVVY system is so user-friendly, they were able to do so without a hitch. A couple of weeks into the new working arrangements, Suncorp called upon DIVVY’s reporting functionality to reveal the actual usage of their parking bays during this period.

The reports issued by the DIVVY Enterprise system showed that as employees stayed at home as much as possible, actual parking usage was lower than Suncorp’s initial projections. Suncorp were able to relinquish the additional commercial parking bays they had leased at the beginning of the restrictions, thereby returning savings to the business, and transfer the staff who had been using those bays over to the DIVVY system to use Suncorp’s own onsite parking.

Suncorp’s onsite parking never reached full capacity during lockdown because DIVVY optimised the use of the spaces so efficiently. DIVVY managed the high number of parkers and the ad hoc, unpredictable pattern of parking usage without fault.

As restrictions ease and workplaces re-open, Suncorp are gradually transitioning their staff back to their offices, with groups of employees starting to return from mid-June. Subject to government advice regarding safe public transport usage, staff will be encouraged to return to public transport and onsite parking will revert to the tool of trade vehicles. Suncorp will continue to use DIVVY Enterpriseto manage and monitor parking usage during the transition period as COVID-19 working procedures are wound down and the trade fleet return to their onsite parking.

Joseph Harmon, Fleet and Car Parking Manager for Suncorp, says,

‘Since 2018, Suncorp has depended on DIVVY to provide convenient and reportable parking management at our Brisbane Square and Shelley Street locations.

DIVVY Enterprise gave us the flexibility to start using our parking bays for a completely different sector of our team almost overnight, helping us to manage our business efficiently during a very unpredictable time.’

DIVVY was fantastic during the COVID-19 restrictions. It gave us complete and accurate visibility over parking bay utilisation and was so easy to use as we added more than a hundred new parkers to the system.

For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.  

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Case Study staff parking

Suncorp & DIVVY: A case study in efficiency and savings

Suncorp, one of Australia’s largest financial services brand

Discover how DIVVY Enterprise helped Suncorp make the most of their existing parking assets to deliver big savings for the business.

Suncorp, one of Australia’s largest financial services brands, operates a fleet of trade vehicles and manages the associated parking. In late 2017, Suncorp commenced a trial with DIVVY Enterprise at their 123 Albert St, Brisbane premises. The challenge was to efficiently manage the parking for their trade vehicles at the site, where there were two-thirds fewer parking bays than vehicles. Suncorp had been managing parking manually via spreadsheets, and to meet perceived demand, additional parking was being leased offsite – at great expense.

DIVVY’s trial got underway and the manual spreadsheets were eliminated, with DIVVY providing precise, accurate real time reporting about vehicles entering and exiting the onsite parking bays.

It wasn’t long before DIVVY established the patterns of usage and it became clear how the trade vehicles and their parking could be managed more efficiently. As a result, Suncorp achieved thousands of dollars’ worth of savings by terminating all additional offsite parking, as with DIVVY’s real-time parking bay management it was no longer needed.

Suncorp also made significant savings by downsizing their trade vehicle fleet, after DIVVY’s reporting showed that the fleet could be streamlined without compromising the business needs.

As well as understanding what DIVVY could deliver in terms of efficiencies and cost savings, Suncorp was keen to trial the DIVVY user experience. Would it be a user-friendly parking management solution for their business? The outcome was clear – DIVVY had helped deliver significant savings to the business and the system was easy to use. The trial was deemed a success and Suncorp rolled DIVVY out to its Brisbane Square premises as well.

In mid-2018, hot on the heels of the Brisbane success story, Suncorp expanded DIVVY into 10 Shelley St, Sydney office. Just as in Brisbane, DIVVY’s reporting established that fewer parking bays could be made to work harder with the DIVVY system.

DIVVY showed that not only could Suncorp use their existing parking bays more efficiently through real-time management with the DIVVY system, but the number of bays under lease also exceeded requirements. Suncorp was able to reduce the number of parking bays, thereby returning even more savings to the business. As well as managing Suncorp’s parking bays efficiently, DIVVY reporting is enabling Suncorp to manage the internal cost allocation of the car bays without fuss.

Suncorp is using DIVVY reporting to allocate parking charges to business cost centres, based on how long staff park for. The data is gathered over a period and projections made, allowing costs to be appropriately distributed between business units.

Suncorp also plans to unlock the Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) reporting feature of DIVVY reporting this financial year, allowing maximum efficiency at tax time with minimum effort.

Joseph Harmon, Parking Administrator for Suncorp, says

“Suncorp started working with DIVVY in 2017, in our buildings in Brisbane and Sydney, as we were looking for a better system to fulling utilise our larger leased car parks and provide more accurate FBT reporting. Suncorp uses DIVVY to provide convenient and reportable parking to our team members with tool of trade vehicles. The biggest change we’ve experienced since partnering with DIVVY is the ability to have online, accurate reporting of parking usage, along with better utilisation of our car parks. This enable our teams to book leased parks for specific time frames and provides greater flexibility and efficiencies for our business. We are currently looking at expanding the service to our other buildings”.

Suncorp is happy to recommend DIVVY to other businesses looking to improve their parking systems

For further information on this case study, please contact our sales team at sales@divvy.com.au

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Case Study staff parking

Data is key to more efficient parking for Boral

Boral Group -DIVVY Parking

Building and construction materials group, Boral, is using data supplied by the DIVVY Technology parking management system to increase efficiencies and flexibility at their North Ryde office.

Triniti Business Park in North Ryde, Sydney, owned by Stockland, is home to a number of blue-chip companies, including Boral Australia’s New South Wales head office and shared services. Stockland installed DIVVY access controllers at Triniti to help their tenants manage staff parking as easily and efficiently as possible.

Looking to recoup costs associated with parking space leases and optimise staff parking, Boral was quick to move to the DIVVY Enterprise system in September 2019 to better manage their 220 parking spaces. Similarly, Downer EDI, another naming tenant in Triniti Business Park, has taken on DIVVY Enterprise. You can read about the way they use DIVVY Technology here.

DIVVY Enterprise’s real-time, detailed and accurate reporting was the key to Boral’s increased efficiencies. Boral wanted to establish whether their leased car parking spaces were being used to their full potential. DIVVY Enterprise’s utilisation reporting gave Boral a clear picture of how their parking spaces were being used.  The data provided an accurate insight into how many parking spaces Boral needed to meet its staff parking needs and how utilisation could be improved based on staff working hours and needs. As a result, Boral now leases 35 fewer parking spaces at the North Ryde office, while still meeting its staff parking needs.

DIVVY Enterprise allows Boral to manage its staff parking in nuanced and incredibly efficient ways. Boral has established parking groups in the DIVVY system based on staff parking needs. By managing groups with different DIVVY features, Boral can ensure that a wide range of staff parking priorities and needs are met.

For example, Boral has a parking group to manage the parking needs of staff who work part-time or who visit the North Ryde office less frequently. Some of these staff create DIVVY accounts and self-book their parking from an allocated pool of parking spaces. Others in this group can access parking from the same pool of spaces through the Book on Behalf feature, managed by Boral administrators, which emails the parker a QR code to access their parking.

A particularly practical feature is that the number of parking spaces assigned to each parking group is managed by Boral’s administrators, meaning that parking spaces can be reallocated from one group to another when required. This detailed level of parking management provides Boral with flexibility and efficiency.

DIVVY Enterprise has also saved Boral’s facilities staff time and effort. Prior to the implementation of the DIVVY Enterprise system, Boral’s facilities team was routinely required to liaise with their Triniti Business Park neighbours in order to resolve issues when staff from other companies incorrectly parked in Boral’s bays.

Now, with DIVVY Enterprise in place, a member of Boral’s facilities team simply contacts the DIVVY support team, who has access to the relevant groups and the driver and vehicle details for all users signed up to the platform. The DIVVY Parking support team can then contact those drivers who have mistakenly parked in the wrong bay.

The more tenants in the business park who implement the DIVVY Enterprise system, the more powerful this function becomes. Triniti Business Park’s two largest tenants, Downer Group and Boral, are both DIVVY users, and thus much time and effort has been saved in this way.

Brian Tasker, National General Manager, Boral Land and Property Group, said:

‘The DIVVY Enterprise parking management system has given us the data and reporting we needed to better understand the parking utilisation and requirements at our North Ryde office. Through the use of DIVVY Enterprise, we have been able to consolidate and streamline our parking and provide greater flexibility and efficiencies for our business.’

For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.  

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How DIVVY Enterprise can generate revenue for your business

Park your car at allotted car parking bay

DIVVY Enterprise is helping businesses across Australia manage their staff parking with maximum efficiency and minimum fuss. Discover how it can also provide your business with an effortless new revenue stream.

Is your carpark always half full? Once the DIVVY Enterprise parking system has streamlined the management of your business’s car parking, it can become apparent that your parking assets are in excess of your requirements. DIVVY Enterprise offers the opportunity to list excess car parking spaces on the DIVVY Marketplace. When parking spaces are listed on DIVVY Marketplace, they become available for booking by others outside your existing parking pool – at a price.

DIVVY Enterprise gives you the control to set the parking product and the rate charged, and the car parking space instantly becomes available to be booked on the DIVVY app. It’s an effortless new revenue source.

Importantly, DIVVY Enterprise offers the utmost in security by allowing you to control who has access to your valuable car parking inventory and when. The Premium Pass options allow you to exercise discretion around who can access the parking spaces you list on DIVVY Marketplace. Choose to open your car parking bays to be booked only by specific people or groups, or all DIVVY users.

For example, businesses may choose to make their car parking spaces available only to other tenants in their building, thus eliminating building access issues. Or they might choose to open the parking spaces to all the existing employees of your business, allowing the entire workforce beyond the current parkers to park onsite at a price.

Alternatively, you can choose to make your car parking bays bookable by all of DIVVY’s 65,000 Australian users for maximum revenue generation opportunities. You set the available times, whether it be weekdays only, or weekends, or specific dayparts or for special events. You control precisely when the parking spaces are available for booking, and by whom they can be booked.

Listing your car parking spaces on DIVVY Marketplace does not mean additional work for you and your team. Thanks to the DIVVY app and DIVVY’s state-of-the-art access controller technology, DIVVY Enterprise offers a seamless parking experience for both car park operators and drivers.

The DIVVY Enterprise real time system integrates bookings, payments and access into one seamless inventory management platform. Not only does the DIVVY Enterprise system save car parking managers and administrators time and hassle, but drivers too. Drivers book and pay for their parking via the DIVVY app and access the carpark using QR code or personalised pin code technology, enjoying an easy, frictionless car parking experience.

Should troubleshooting be required, DIVVY offers support to all parkers and businesses 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year via phone, live chat and email. DIVVY customer support staff have access to operate boom gates and roller doors, meaning real solutions for parkers and saving property and facilities teams time and effort.

For further information about how DIVVY Enterprise can help your business generate new revenue from your existing car parking assets, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.  

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Case Study staff parking

Making parking simple for GenesisCare

Genesis Care office in Sydney

Leading healthcare group GenesisCare are focused on supporting their staff in their important purpose: designing innovative treatments and care for people with cancer, heart disease and sleep disorders. They are improving the small details, like parking, to enable their people to concentrate on their vital work. That’s why they chose DIVVY Technology to manage the staff parking at their Australian national office – when elements like parking are simple and seamless, people are free to focus on what is important.

When Dexus rolled out DIVVY’s parking management system at their property The Mill at Alexandria in June, GenesisCare also came onboard with DIVVY. GenesisCare’s Australian national office comprises of the largest tenancy at The Mill, with 55 of the property’s 130 parking bays on their lease. Dissatisfied with the user experience of their previous parking management system, GenesisCare are now using the DIVVY Enterprise system to manage all their staff parking needs.

DIVVY Enterprise’s additional features include ‘Free Up My Space’, whereby employees with assigned car spaces can free up their space for others to book when it is not in use, and ‘Book on Behalf’, allowing parking to be booked for visitors or other employees. DIVVY Enterprise also makes it possible for companies to charge their staff for parking, managing the entire process from booking to payment. 

Property & Facilities Manager at GenesisCare, Hoani Tainui said:

“The ease and simplicity of the DIVVY user experience is what initially attracted us to the system. As an organisation, we are undergoing a period of rapid growth, so it is absolutely imperative that we get the right systems and processes in place at our head office in Alexandria.”

GenesisCare are the first Dexus tenant to implement the DIVVY Enterprise system for staff parking management.

For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au