Nov 2019
29
BrightPay wins ‘Payroll Software of the Year 2019'
BrightPay was announced as the WINNER of ‘Payroll Software of the Year 2019’ at the ICB Luca Awards.
The annual LUCA Awards recognise outstanding achievement in the bookkeeping world, where ICB members and students vote in an online ballot to decide the winners of the awards. This year, BrightPay was awarded Payroll Software of the Year, over shortlisted contenders Moneysoft, Sage and Xero.
The awards took place earlier this week, during the annual two-day Bookkeepers Summit, where the BrightPay team had great feedback from the ICB members who are using BrightPay.
Payroll Software you can trust…
The award comes just one year after BrightPay was announced as the winner of ‘Payroll Software of the Year’ 2018 at the AccountingWEB Software Excellence Awards.
With over 25 years of payroll experience, our products are used to process the payroll for over 320,000 businesses across the UK and Ireland. BrightPay also has an impressive 99% customer satisfaction rate and a 5-star rating on Software Advice.
BrightPay for Bookkeepers
BrightPay includes a number of features that are very beneficial for bookkeepers.
- With BrightPay, you can batch process the payroll. You can finalise payslips, check for coding notices, and send outstanding RTI & CIS submissions to HMRC for multiple employers at the same time.
- BrightPay includes direct integration with accounting packages, where you can send your payroll journal directly from BrightPay to Sage One, Quickbooks Online and Xero at the click of a button.
- With the BrightPay Connect add-on, there is the ability to invite your clients to an online employer dashboard. The client can enter their employee’s hours and payment information for the pay period, and once reviewed, this information can be synchronised to the payroll software on the bureaus PC.
These are just a few of the many features we have in BrightPay that can help bookkeepers, but there’s so much more on offer. Don’t miss out - book a demo today to see these features in action and to discover more ways that BrightPay’s award-winning software can improve efficiency and save you time.
We would like to say a massive thank you to all of the ICB members and students who voted for us this year and to all of our customers. Go team BrightPay!!
Nov 2019
27
How cloud payroll portals jack up your cybersecurity
Until the recent past, small businesses were unlikely targets for sophisticated cyber-attacks. But in the internet era, things have changed dramatically.
SMEs are doing more business online than ever and they are using cloud services that don’t use strong encryption technology. It’s turned your average SME into a likely, lucrative target. There’s a lot of sensitive data to be had, and if it’s behind a door with an easy lock to pick then all the better.
This new reality is on display in official statistics. Over four in ten businesses (43%) and two in ten charities (19%) experienced a cybersecurity breach or attack in 2018, according to the government’s cybersecurity breaches survey.
Three-quarters of businesses (74%) and over half of all charities (53%) surveyed also identified cybersecurity as a high priority for their organisation’s senior management. It’s likely GDPR and its stiffened sanctions for breaches and blunders has a lot to do with this heightened priority.
Payroll processing is a key innovation battleground in this new era of hacks and data regulation. Clients want the convenience of online access to their payroll information, but they also demand (and require) the very best in security.
For a bureau, offering best-in-class cybersecurity is a valuable way to add and demonstrate value, with very little actual effort on your part. A bureau using the most secure cloud payroll facility will offer data security as standard.
Meanwhile, the security itself is actually handled by the software supplier and the infrastructure they provide. All you need to do is make the right choice when it comes to picking a software partner.
When using BrightPay Connect in conjunction with your BrightPay desktop application, for instance, all communication between both systems is carried out on a safe channel with maximum security.
BrightPay utilises all manner of best practice to guard against nefarious tactics such as data injection, authentication hacking, cross-site scripting, exposure flaws, request forgery, and the many other types of vulnerabilities.
BrightPay Connect utilises the Microsoft Azure platform to give users reliability, scalability, data redundancy, geo-replication and timely security updates out of the box.
As a payroll bureau, cybersecurity is a critical commercial area. You must be able to promise security to both current and prospective clients. By investing in payroll software that offers cloud integration powered by the latest tech, that’s an easy promise to keep. Being at the bleeding edge of cybersecurity has never been simpler.
Book a demo today to discover more ways that BrightPay Connect can protect your business.
Nov 2019
19
How to use cloud technology to attract new staff
The Cloud is the current buzz-word in technology. Employers in the know are reaping the benefits from its capabilities, including helping them attract and retain new staff.
Why is this important? Becoming an employer of choice has never been more important, especially as we are at near full employment. A quick search of any of the main job boards will show an abundance of available jobs. It’s a jobseeker’s market. The challenge for employers therefore is to attract and retain the best candidates. One way to attract and retain employees is to offer them something new, something edgy… a strong, feature-rich, cloud employee self-service system could be it.
Today’s world has gone online, everyone has social media accounts, we are all familiar with buying many of our goods and services online. This is particularly true for millenials (generally defined as those born between 1984 and 1999) who are are fast becoming the largest sector of our workforce. Understanding how to tap into their fast-paced expectations is crucial for business success.
Businesses who do not compete in this space run risks of being overlooked by prospective employees, millennials in particular. This is where employers should consider a cloud, employee self-service system. Offering online access to their annual leave calendar, their personal details, their employers details, all their HR documents and all of their payslips on their smartphones via a dedicated employee app is the smartest, most cost effective way to show your employees you are in the same digital space that they are.
Book a demo today to find out how your business can benefit from cloud self-service systems.
Nov 2019
14
Customer Update: November 2019
Welcome to BrightPay's November update where you will find out about the latest hot topics and events affecting payroll. Our most important news this month include:
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IR35 clampdown - Three BBC presenters are made pay back a total of £92,000
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Expand your payroll services with online client platforms
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3 GDPR myths you need to ignore
Online payslips offering enhanced GDPR security
Manually approving requests, keeping track of the employees’ annual leave and inputting new data into the payroll software takes a lot of time and can be a frustrating administrative burden for both payroll and HR staff. To make the process easier for all parties involved, the BrightPay Connect app provides a self-service platform that employees can access anytime, anywhere, using the smartphone app or online portal.
CPD Accredited Webinar: Expand your payroll services with online client platforms
Standing out in a crowd of other payroll bureau providers is no easy task, and it’s getting more difficult all the time. Difficult, but not impossible. As a payroll bureau, you need to find unique ways to differentiate your practice from all the others.
Cloud innovation and online client portals are making it easier than ever before for bureaus to offer value-added service. Savvy bureaus are implementing client online dashboards customised with their own bureau branding to effectively differentiate themselves, in order to stand out from their competitors.
Accountants rewarded who take a leap of faith into the cloud
All of us, in the hyper-connected internet era, have found ourselves at a loss when using some software, website or app. You just want to do one thing, or you want to set something up and... you just can’t. It might feel like specific software or apps are testing us in some way. Only those who can navigate through the narrow tunnels of this software are genuinely worthy, in some weird twist on the Arthurian legend of Excalibur.
Clients can now input their employee hours into BrightPay
BrightPay Connect allows bureau users to securely send payroll entry requests and payroll approval requests to their clients, changing the way payroll bureaus interact and communicate with clients. Clients can securely add their employee’s hours saving bureaus hours of administrative time each pay period. Ultimately, your client will be accountable for ensuring the payroll information is 100% correct before the payroll is finalised. Additionally, there is an audit trail of the requests being approved by the client.
Do you want more empowered employees?
Despite the political and social chaos of the moment, we do live in more enlightened times, and employees have more rights now than ever before. Part of that evolution involves empowerment, an integral aspect of BrightPay Connect’s appeal. Payroll bureaus can now offer their clients’ employees easier online access to manage their own payroll information, annual leave, personal contact data and payslips on the go.
Employees can browse and download their history of payslips and other payroll documents, view their payroll calendar, including annual leave, sick leave, and parenting leave, make changes and direct annual leave requests, fully informed.
