Specialist payroll services for accountancy practices
With many years’ experience delivering accountancy payroll, Dataplan is ideally placed to support accountancy practices increase the efficiency and profitability of their payroll service.
Traditionally a non-core activity for many accountancy practices, increasing complexity in legislation and compliance is now putting increasing burdens on in-house payroll teams. This is prompting more practices to look at alternative ways of delivering payroll, whilst maintaining the trusted advisor status with their clients.
Payroll is different from the other services offered by accountants;
- Materiality – while a customer may not be interested or even notice if their accruals are misstated by £1000, underpay an employee but £1 and it is a major issue in the eyes of a client.
- Deadlines – a company faces one or two accountancy filing deadlines a year, payroll brings many more. A typical monthly payroll brings has deadlines for payday, RTI filings, Pension returns plus many others. These deadlines are relentless and do not move.
- Compliance – the perception is that payroll is similar to bookkeeping in delivery, it is, in fact, a heavily legislated area. The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP) quote 174 separate pieces of legislation affecting payroll.
- Information security & data protection – unlike accountancy work, payroll is pretty much all dealing with personal data, some of which is even sensitive. To ensure compliance with GDPR and information security standards, email is not an acceptable form of communication, unless everything is password protected.
- Perception – payroll is generally perceived as a low-level transaction service with little appreciation of value in the context of an accountancy practice, yet it has the potential to derail and damage a valuable client relationship if not handled well.