Our initial introduction to Michels and Taylor came about due to the purchase of three new hotels that had previously had their payroll managed by their Head Office. The acquisition by Michels and Taylor meant that this could no longer happen and they started to look for a provider they could outsource the handling of their hotel payrolls.
The hospitality sector has very specific challenges in terms of payroll such as:
- Short approval times
- Variable payroll schedules
- Many different types of staff contracts and rates of pay
- Complicated shift patterns, including add-ons and incentives
- High staff turnover, so lots of starters and leavers
- A high proportion of workers around the National Minimum Wage level
- Lots of different nationalities within the employee cohort
As Alice Humphris, Group HR Manager for Michels and Taylor, stated,
Hospitality staff are very sensitive about their pay and accuracy of pay as they will often be working different shift patterns and extra hours to make up pay levels.
We were able to manage these complexities and it was our ability to turn around payrolls in a matter of days, rather than the two weeks other providers requested, that resulted in Dataplan being appointed as Michels and Taylor’s payroll partner.
Our team spent time to understand this unusual business model and Alice has “been impressed by their attitude to learn and communicate with us”.
We pride ourselves on being flexible and proactive and this is shown in the work we have done with one of Michel and Taylor’s suppliers, eProductive, who provide staff scheduling systems. There was a need to integrate our systems with theirs for greater efficiency and time saving, so our solution was to develop an API to facilitate this integration.
As Alice explained,
Dataplan just rolled their sleeves up and sorted it out with eProductive.
I am thrilled with the new system and it even caught me by surprise how good and easy it is. It just seemed so simple to use that at first I wondered if it was too good to be true, but it wasn’t!
It has been a huge weight off my mind that the hotels are not spending days on their payrolls and can now do their part in a matter of hours.
Dataplan are comfortable talking with the hotels directly and liaising with the staff at new hotels as they come on board. If there are any queries Dataplan are approachable and explain things in a way that everyone can understand.
The nature of the business model means that their different hotels often have different pension companies providing their Workplace Pensions. Dataplan take this in their stride, with their Pension Team liaising effectively with all pension companies.
Dataplan have a real ‘can do’ attitude which is especially useful when a new hotel acquisition comes on board and crazy timescales are sprung on them.