Table of contents
About the business:
- Type: Retail
- Location: Alameda, CA
- Employees: 4
- Payment Processing Terminal: Poynt
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Background
Cathe started Needle in a Haystack, a retail store that specializes in hard-to-find needlework supplies, after a successful career as a software engineer and engineering manager at Sun Microsystems. While Cathe’s customers rely on her extensive selections of fabrics and threads, she relies on (and loves) technology; Cathe is a self-professed geek who prefers tech blogs over the needlework blogs. Her focus on technology is what helped Cathe find her current POS system--Poynt--and subsequently Homebase.
How Cathe found Homebase
After reading about the latest and greatest in POS systems, Cathe decided on the soon to be released Poynt terminal. Cathe loves her Poynt system, especially how the terminal will “phone home,” or in more technical terms, get software updates on a regular basis. During one such software update, Cathe noticed that Poynt included Homebase in the “Featured Apps” section, and was intrigued by its promise of online time cards. Before Homebase, Cathe was weighed down by file cabinets filled with old time cards and receipts. [sp_review name="Cathe" position="Owner at Needle in a Haystack"]Not having all that paper has made my life SO much easier.[/sp_review]
About the business:
How Homebase helped
Cathe loves that Homebase integrates directly with Poynt, so that her employees can clock in and out for their shifts on the Poynt terminal. But where Cathe is saving the most time (and the most trees) is on transferring the timesheets to payroll. Before Homebase, Cathe was using paper time cards, and needed to physically go into the store to transfer the paper time cards to a manual spreadsheet each pay period. This became especially troublesome when Cathe wanted to take a much needed vacation, and needed to have someone go into the store and read out the data so she could enter it into payroll. What a mess!
Enter Homebase
Now Cathe can run payroll from anywhere, as she simply exports the timesheets data out into her payroll spreadsheet. Things like employee availability and time off are all now stored in the cloud for her, meaning she doesn’t have to physically track these details week over week. Moving to Homebase both “saved time, and just made life easier,” for Cathe. And the geeky part of her loves how all her time card data is stored in the cloud. “Now that I have Poynt and Homebase, I was able to get rid of an entire file drawer, as Poynt stores all my credit card receipts and Homebase stores all my time cards. Not having all that paper has made my life SO much easier.”
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Sonia Urlando
Sonia Urlando is a Senior Content Strategist at Homebase, where she runs the SEO content program, leads content strategy, and writes customer stories that capture the real lived experiences of small business owners with hourly teams. Since joining Homebase in 2025, she's focused on creating content that makes workforce management challenges easier to navigate.
With over a decade of content marketing experience, Sonia specializes in SEO strategy and customer storytelling. She's published hundreds of SEO articles, written dozens of customer stories and case studies, and driven measurable impact—including 277% year-over-year organic traffic growth in a previous role. She's built content programs from scratch and helped established brands across healthcare, nonprofit, education, and tech SaaS connect with their audiences.
Sonia spent years working directly with small businesses—from building ecommerce sites for beauty and wellness brands to serving retail customers for an athletic clothing brand—and she brings that hands-on understanding to every piece of content she creates. Since 2018, she's also volunteered as Managing Editor at Augur Magazine, a nonprofit literary publication where she's done everything from copy editing to marketing to podcasting.
Remember: This is not legal advice. If you have questions about your particular situation, please consult a lawyer, CPA, or other appropriate professional advisor or agency.
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