amipak Case Study

Fiona Weir, Office Manager of amipak has been running the payroll for 5 years. With 60 employees across two sites, split between monthly and weekly payroll cycles, Fiona had a job on her hands with the introduction of auto enrolment.

Fiona explains that “we have 54 weekly paid staff, 8 monthly and 2 directors and Earnie Business helps me to manage these employees over the two sites because it is very user friendly.”

Auto enrolment

When it came down to auto enrolment, Fiona explained that her initial feeling towards auto enrolment was that of panic. She explained “we didn’t think we would be able to handle the complex legislation at all when we first heard about it. We initially thought that we would have to run our payroll, export the information to our pension provider who would work out the deductions for us and then we would have to re-import that data back and run the payroll again, it seemed that there would be a lot of areas for human error.”

The IRIS AE Suite™

“We found out about the IRIS AE Suite™ via one of the email bulletins from IRIS and we decided that we should take a look into the solution and see how it could work for us.”

“We attended an extremely helpful, free online demonstration of the software by our account manager. This helped us see that the software would help us comply and save me a lot of time, so to make the decision to adopt the IRIS AE Suite™ was easy.”

Fiona explained that initially, she didn’t feel like there was enough help and support around auto enrolment and that she felt like the burden was solely on her to try and work out what needed to be done. Fiona explained that “if we had to do it again, we would definitely allow more time. We ended up having to defer our staging date for three months and used this as a period of time to try and understand more about our responsibilities.”

“Our director had the foresight to realise that this would be a difficult process that would have been impossible for me to do manually and this also contributed to the decision for us to adopt the IRIS AE Suite™.” Making this decision meant that amipak would be able to avoid using an IFA or middleware solution for their assessments, which is a drawn-out, labour intensive process that takes up a lot of time unnecessarily.

Implementation

The implementation of the IRIS AE Suite™ with Earnie Business was done via a remote configuration where the consultant used details of amipak’s pension arrangements to configure their IRIS AE Suite™ software over the internet. Fiona explained that the implementation went smoothly and everything was installed and working as it should be.

Benefits

“The main benefit of adopting the IRIS AE Suite™ is the fact that it keeps us compliant and that we do not incur the non-compliance fines. Furthermore, the amount of time saving that we can attribute to it.”

“Running our payroll including auto enrolment now only takes us a morning to do, whereas if we were to do it manually, it would probably take us around 3 days per payroll run. Additionally, on top of that, one thing that you may not initially be able to quantify is the amount of stress and anxiety that is alleviated with the knowledge that we are fully compliant with the legislation by using payroll software. This is another big thing that IRIS has helped me with after the worries I had with RTI and Payroll Year-End.”

IRIS OpenPayslips

“We have had an excellent take-up of IRIS OpenPayslips with the vast majority of our employees supplying an email address and opting for electronic payslips, P60s and pension communications. IRIS OpenPayslips is one of the main aspects that I particularly like about the IRIS AE Suite™, it is brilliant because of the tremendous amount of time and cost-saving, it must save us at least an hour every payroll run. This is in the amount of time no longer needing to be spent on printing, sorting, posting and sending the payslips.”

Help and Support

“Every time I have used the email and telephone support for any questions I may have had, has been excellent. The team is really good and has helped me with any queries I have had.”

Recommendation

“I would definitely recommend IRIS and the IRIS AE Suite™ to other businesses to stay compliant and save time. The advice I would give would be to start looking into the legislation and available solutions as early as possible, to ensure a smooth setup.