Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 

It seems that the festive period comes around quicker each year but it is a great opportunity for me to personally wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It also gives me the chance to take a look back over the past 12 months at IRIS and identify a few highlights.

First of all I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to all of the help, support and custom that we have received from you all this year. From feedback on our training courses to our customer satisfaction survey, we really could not; and would not be where we are today without you.

We have had a great year helping businesses through their staging date with over 500,000 employees from over 1,900 businesses assessed and auto enrolled to date through utilisation of our auto enrolment solution, launched back in April. This is a huge achievement for us as recently it was announced that over 5 million employees are auto enrolled into a pension scheme in the UK. After acquiring Cascade HR; our collective client base now makes up over 10% of the total amount of employees auto enrolled, making us the largest auto enrolment software provider in the UK. 

Another highlight of the year for us was the acquisition of the HR and payroll solutions provider; Cascade HR back in April. With a joint customer base of over 60,000 UK businesses, the deal helped to reinforce IRIS’ position as one of the leading providers of business critical software and broadened IRIS’ product differentiation. We felt that the superb HR suite was a perfect fit for our payroll software and we can now move forward on our joint goal of making payroll and HR easier for our customers. 

We have increased the IRIS Support Team by 33% to make sure that we can answer your support calls as quickly as possible. Furthermore, we have heavily invested in our research and development team and this has grown by over 20% to ensure that we can deliver compliance and innovation. Of particular note is the IRIS Automatic Enrolment Suite™ which is the industry’s leading AE solution delivering assessment in payroll, pension file generation and pension letters, payslips and P60s direct to your smartphone.

Another acquisition was Kashflow which has also been developing at an impressive rate, recently introducing Magic Bank Reconciliation through the use of Bank Feeds in an effort to help speed up daily bookkeeping for SMEs. In addition to this is the introduction of the auto enrolment assessment in Kashflow Payroll helping ensure that users comply with workplace pension legislation.

The annual Earnie Customer Conference was held in November at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. The event attracted over 90 payroll professionals to one room to hear updates and product demonstrations. We also had legislation updates from guest speakers from The Pensions Regulator and the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP). Furthermore there were 1-2-1 question and answer sessions about the Earnie payroll software. We love having the opportunity to meet and interact with all of our clients so we felt that this was a massive success!

One final thing to mention is the comprehensive KnowledgeBase that has developed extensively over the past year. This massive undertaking has over 2,100 articles which can be searched through to find a vast amount of information from troubleshooting to "how-tos". 

So again, from everyone at IRIS, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Kind Regards

Mark Paraskeva
CEO, IRIS SME Division