Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at IRIS!

First of all I would just like to take this opportunity to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, Prosperous New Year!

It's that time of year again when it really only feels like yesterday that I was writing this blog. The opportunity again has presented itself to reflect on another fantastic year for IRIS Software.

2015 was the year that we saw our exciting acquisition of Keytime Ltd; an award winning independent software vendor of integrated practice software to over 1,700 UK practices. 

The IRIS Group Chairman Phill Robinson said of the move,

“Keytime’s practice software is a superb fit within our portfolio of solutions that provide market-leading solutions to UK accountants of all sizes. Together we are passionate about providing technology to support legislative changes, and continually inventing better ways to connect accountants, businesses and their employees. We look forward to welcoming the Keytime team to the Group.”

In addition to this, we have continued to improve the quality of service offered by the Support team by encouraging staff to spend more time on self-development with the aim of continued improvement.

The support feedback survey which launched in January 2015 continues to be sent out after every contact with Support and provides us with a great insight. From this we have learned that over 90% of queries are resolved first time and each agent is ranked very highly.

To improve our service offering further, the management team are constantly monitoring the Support wait times and if you compare the period of January 2015 - August 2015 to the same time the previous year, the average wait has reduced by 149%.

You asked us for "extra functionality" and for us to "simplify auto enrolment" and we followed up on that this year, too. The product team have been working tirelessly to speak to everyone who took the time to inform us with their ideas around extra functionality. We have been compiling the feedback to find out what is achievable and then we will review what action to take next.

We have also added the auto enrolment configuration tool to the IRIS AE Suite™ with the main aim to make auto enrolment set up simpler within your software. We thought that this was a great way to help you understand which of your employees were being enrolled and the reasons why they were being enrolled.

Improving our sales and marketing, you asked us for more knowledgeable staff and better value training. As a result of this, we are continuing to develop our internal product training and accreditation programs to increase staff knowledge. In addition to this, we are also running more free bite-sized training covering key topics including legislation and product features. We have also launched an online library of on-demand webinars.

We also held an extremely successful IRIS Payroll Conference at the home of English Rugby, Twickenham Stadium back in October. This event brought together The Pensions Regulator, Pension Providers, The CIPP and IRIS Customers to share experiences and challenges behind payroll. Some of the main topics were based around auto enrolment and the eagerly anticipated IRIS Holiday Pay Module, coming early next year.

So with an extremely hectic but successful 2015 coming to an end, I would like to take this opportunity to extend a huge thank you for your continued support and would like you to join me in the anticipated arrival of the new year!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us here at IRIS!

Mark Paraskeva, CEO of IRIS SME Division