The Priory Avenue Surgery

The Priory Avenue Surgery is a busy doctors’ practice in the heart of Caversham, Reading.

The surgery has around 8,100 patients on its books. There are five partner GPs, two salaried GPs and 20 other members of the team from administrative staff to nurses to cleaners.

The surgery takes pride in offering the highest standard of patient-focused healthcare. It offers a whole range of medical services from chronic disease care to ante natal services, minor surgery and general medical check-ups.

It is important that a surgery of Priory Avenue’s size runs as smoothly as possible. Finance officer Ruth Griffiths uses both IRIS GP Accounts and IRIS GP Payroll on a day to day basis.

Ruth explained what she liked about the software.

She said: “IRIS was very simple to pick up. As far as IRIS GP Accounts is concerned I had come from somewhere where we used a different system and IRIS was comparatively much more straight forward.

“The reporting is brilliant on the accounts software. Sometimes I just need a quick report of something I’m looking at and that is very simple to do. And once you’ve got it you can do with it whatever you like – put it into excel  or make a PDF of it.

“It is very easy to locate the information you need. You can view the whole cash book or just view income or expenditure. You can also view just NHS income and IRIS provides the ability to upload NHS income statements from the NHS Open Exeter website.

“If I need to go back to find anything, I have eight years of history there to call on. I use the notes against each transaction we make too, so if I come to a transaction I made sometime previously and can’t remember what it was, the notes tell me straight away.

“I had not done payroll before so it took a little longer to pick up IRIS GP Payroll. The manual, online help and support are excellent. Complications with payroll are not generally about the software but about the legislation, eg understanding SMP, tax codes etc. IRIS is much simpler than other packages out there and generally I am very happy with it. We don’t use all the functionality available, particularly the HR functionality, but we do use what we need to. It doesn’t take long to run a payroll now – probably about an hour –unless we have a new starter or anything that is not the same in a certain month.  In that case it takes a little longer. I particularly like the end of year function. It is very straightforward and for us only takes half a day to do it all.

“The support from IRIS is also very good. I tend to email them because I can send a screen dump of whatever the problem is. The staff are always very helpful and even if a problem has been caused by a user mistake they will put you back on track.

“I would definitely recommend IRIS GP Accounts and IRIS GP Payroll. For a small organisation it is great. Even someone who comes from less of a financial background than me would have no problem using it.”