Payroll Consultancy

We recognise the complexity of payroll administration and management. We also recognise that not all payroll offices will have staff with all the required skills.

This is where we help. We have a team of consultants available to help you with payroll related projects.

We can pull on a wide range of resources to help you with major payroll projects. With consultants available for short or long term projects, we can meet your payroll consultancy needs. Our consultants are from a wide range of payroll-related backgrounds (private and public sectors), and between them have experienece of a wide range of payroll related projects.

Our key consultant is Philip Bird FIPPM MInstAM MIDM, and we can also call on the resources of other key players within the payroll profession. We have expertise in a range of consultancy projects, and would be delighted to provide a free no-obligation quote to determine your requirements.

Costs are levied on a daily basis, depending on the individual consultant/s used and the period of the contract. Please contact us to discuss your specific requirements, and we will provide you with a written quotation.

System Selection
"Are you considering changing your payroll system? When was the last time you reviewed the service provided by your bureaux?"

We can help you to determine your requirements, prepare an invitation to tender (ITT), and help you through the selection process. By helping you to determine your requirements we can also recommend some additional features that you may not have considered. By preparing the ITT we can discuss and formulate your requirements so that those tendering can address each of your requirements. We can then help you to consider the tenders, and to short-list. We can sit in on meetings with the short-listed companies to help you to understand what they are offering, and to assist you to ask the relevant questions.

Procedures Review
"Do you have a Payroll Procedures Manual? Are your procedures, including Contingency Plans, documented and up to date?"

We can help you to document your payroll procedures, and at the same time recommend improvements and enhancements to your procedures. It is important that your procedures are documented.

Payroll Health Check
"Do you have any dispensations? Are all your payments procedures complying with HMRC requirements?"

We will review the operation of payments to employees, including payments through expenses and petty cash. We can inform you if tax and NIC is not being deducted where it should be, or even being deducted where it needn't. We can provide a Health Check as a dummy HMRC audit/review. We'll ask similar questions, and perform the same sort of checks as HMRC, but we won't give you a bill for unpaid income tax and National Insurance Contributions! Instead, we will provide advice on what action to take. If necessary we can also help with HMRC negotiations if a settlement is required.

Administration Procedures
"Is your payroll running as smoothly as it should?  Do you have problems with communication and exchanges of information?  Have you received whether your administration procedures should be overhauled?"

Many payroll offices do things because "that is the way it's always been done".  A fresh set of eyes reviewing administration procedures and the document flow, can often bring about significant improvements in administration procedures, and improve efficiency.  We can review your payroll procedures (from before you receive the time data, to after you've sent out the payslips) and make recommendations for improviements.  Whilst doing this, we will also examine audit controls, potential for fraud, and contingency planning.

Recruitment
"We can help with recruiting payroll staff."

We recognise the importance of the payroll function for every employer. For this reason it is important that the right person is appointed to either head up your payroll function, or to be a member of your payroll staff. If you appoint the wrong person it can often take considerable time before all the problems come to light, by which time you may already have missed some statutory deadlines, acted illegally with some of your payroll procedures, and paid you staff late, wrong or even not paid the mat all.

Services on offer to help you through the recruitment process:

• Job Description / Advertisement We will help you prepare the job description, person profile, and any advertising, to help you to attract the right candidate for the role. Is the job description up to date? Are the payroll phrases in the advert correct? - We will look at these issues for you.
• Telephone Interviewing We can telephone prospective candidates and ask them a few basic payroll questions over the telephone. This helps to establish the authenticity of some of the aspects of the c.v., and avoids you (and the candidate) wasting time by holding interviews with candidates which are clearly unsuitable.
• Interview Panels When you get to the stage of holding interviews, do you have someone to attend the interviews that can ask the right questions to test a candidates payroll knowledge and experience? Do you have someone who can establish whether someone is bluffing their way through the skills they say they have? We can sit in on the interviews to help establish the skills that the candidates really have.
• Payroll Tests We can conduct tests to establish the practical experience and skills of candidates. Tests are set at an appropriate level for the vacancy. The tests will help to establish the practical payroll skills of the candidate, as well as test their knowledge of payroll legislation and procedures. Important: We are not a recruitment agency, and do not hold details of candidates on file.