The benefits of outsourcing your payroll and what to look for when choosing a provider 1 Resources Do you worry about who is going to run your payroll? Have you suffered a late payroll due to staff absence? If you outsource your payroll you won’t have to worry because it will be the provider’s responsibility to run, on time. Pick a provider with a sizable number of employees to cover holiday gaps etc. READ MORE

Sir Paul Chambers was never a household name, even in his lifetime but he came up with an innovation that changed the economy. This was back in the early 1940s when the world was at war and those left behind in Whitehall began to think about the post-war era. We all know about the other institutions founded then, the National Health Service and state education for instance but less is said about the seismic shift in the way tax is collected. Before then, most people paid tax in arrears, calculating what they owed and paying a lump sum to the taxman. READ MORE

Payroll tends to be a poor relation but boy is it important when it’s wrong One thing you can be sure of – if you mess up a payroll you’ll really know about it and it could have big consequences. That’s why it’s really important that whoever is responsible is accurate, reliable and on time. If not, it needs fixing. Payroll and Covid 19 READ MORE

It’s often a struggle fitting in the payroll processing but clearly it’s important to avoid mistakes which can quickly lead to staff problems and significant fines. Running a payroll is quite a challenge. It’s easy to regard it as a simple task when in fact an awful lot can go wrong, causing cost and upset employees, not to mention fines from HMRC or the Pension Regulator. The table below shows some of the errors we’ve inherited with new payrolls, nearly all of which you will need to be on the right side of when running your payroll, whoever does it.   READ MORE

Online working or Onsite? Our work of book-keeping with management accounts plus a payroll bureau was about 85% online before Covid-19, now of course it’s 100%.  READ MORE

It’s often a struggle fitting in the payroll processing but clearly it’s important to avoid mistakes which can quickly lead to staff problems and significant fines. Here are some of our experiences: Examples of payroll and auto enrollment problems READ MORE

I attended an auto enrolment presentation by Star Payroll on Monday. One of the speakers was Henry Tapper from Pension PlayPen whose analysis shows that the transfer of responsibilities from financial advisers to accountants and payroll bureaux intermediaries is happening far slower than expected. But things could be about to change, drastically. READ MORE

Put business people together and it won’t be long before someone mentions outsourcing. It might be in the context of freeing time for the other activities you’re told you must do to compete in the market place. Or to do with concerns about maintaining service quality. Or even the difference between outsourcing and offshoring. Whatever the reason, the consensus is increasingly likely to favour outsourcing. READ MORE

Whitehall's independent red tape watchdog reckons the govenemmnet has reduced red tape by £2.2 billion a year however the regulatory policy committee has calculated that new EU rules have inmposed £2.3 billion  in net costs to businesses. So looks like it's gone up! This is before the pension auto enrolment hots most busiisnesses in 2015 or later. Perhaps the benefit of such a consideration is to check what a business can do itself to avoid red tape and the most obvious way is to outsource so somebody else has to cope. READ MORE

We're well into this so what do we think so far? The first thing to say is that it really is a massive task, there is so much to learn and so much to get wrong. Compared with the previous biggest ever change to payroll, which was RTI Real Time Initiative, it has to be at least 20 times the effort and that's for our professional staff who are used to such. It's also quite different as it involves deductions from pay, so requires employee liaison. READ MORE

Why outsource or more positively why not? Outsourcing used to be something that was just for very large organisations. Increasingly though, small and medium sized businesses are realising the benefits of outsourcing some of their functions to reduce costs, increase resilience and allow them to do what they do best, run their own business. READ MORE

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