Case Study

Whittles Chartered Accountants

Whittles Chartered Accountants was established in 1991 and today, continues to build on our enviable reputation for providing excellent advice and first class service to our business and personal clients alike. Whittles are totally committed to providing our clients with the very best advice and expertise available. We specialise in providing the personal attention that individual and SME businesses require.

Business Payroll Challenge

The reason behind why Whittles wanted to look to change from IRIS Bureau was twofold. The lesser issue was that we had moved to a remote server and IRIS did not work very well on this system despite being told that it would when sold this over IRIS PAYE-Master. There were often issues when we had to get support to fix or reboot errors that occurred due it turned out to working on a remote server. The bigger reason was the extra charges that IRIS wanted to impose for emailed payslips and for auto enrolment.

We had one client due to enrol imminently and the charges that IRIS wanted to add before we even introduced a profit element for ourselves would have doubled this one clients monthly fee. As the client was a charity we did not feel we could impose such an increase of this size. Looking ahead we also felt that many smaller clients would be extremely resistant to such a big increase in charges. Whilst IRIS could meet all our payroll requirements the price they wanted to charge would just be unacceptable to our clients and we worried that this would make us less competitive.

Payroll & Auto Enrolment Solution

We started to research other payroll options having failed to negotiate better terms for emailed payslips and auto enrolment with IRIS. We looked at reports and comments on accounting web and checked out various options. Sage seemed not very much cheaper than IRIS. Brightpay seemed to be highly recommended but the fact that Brightpay could be downloaded as a 60 day free trial persuaded us to trial the software and see what we thought of it.

The payroll software we required needed to:

Run on more than 1 screen
Work on a remote server
Run the payroll and produce reports suitable to issue to clients including P45's & P60's
Deal with basic payroll, the various statutory payments, attachment orders.
Produce payslips without buying special paper.
Run multiple company payrolls.
Handle run mixed weekly and monthly pay runs under the same scheme.
Process RTI submissions.
Deal with auto enrolment.

BrightPay Testing

We chose Brightpay initially because it was recommended by bureaus on accounting web, we could trial it for free and the price once we had decided it met our main requirements was good. We set Brightpay up on 2 screens and put on our own payroll and one large payroll to test it out. Once we had set up a couple of companies we ran and matched the payroll to our existing software. Brightpay was simple to use and worked well on a remote server without previous issues which made the staff using the software happy. The payslips could be emailed and staff enjoyed getting payslips this way.

BrightPay Payroll

By moving to Brightpay we have been able to deliver the same payroll services as before at a reasonable cost but with the added extras of being able to email payslips and down the line to deal with the processes of auto enrolment. Customers and their staff like the new emailed payslips and P60's.

Cost Savings

Processing payroll via Brightpay does not seem quicker in time than our previous payroll but the difference in time is quite minimal. The difference in cost however means that we can keep our costs competitive. The introduction of importing tax codes in the 15/16 tax year will save time and is a big improvement on Brightpay.

Ease of Use

The payroll features we particularly like on Brightpay are its easy and straightforward to use. Payslips are clear and easy to read and look good when emailed. The price is good value.