Merchant Investors Gets The Best Of Both Worlds With Payrite
Formed in 1970 and based in the centre of Bristol, Merchant Investors administers policies and funds totalling in excess of one billion pounds and offer the ability for investors to manage their own investments through a number of Self Invested products. The company provides niche products and services to high net worth clients. Due to its clientele Merchant Investors offers the old fashioned service values of personal contact, for example, no call centres and a commitment to excellent customer service.
The Challenge
When the main payroll expert within the company announced their retirement the company had to rethink the way that it handled not only the staff payroll but even more importantly, how they were going to administer the payroll for the 5,500 plus annuitants that are paid regularly. Every day of the week, Merchant Investors’ accountants department is running a payroll for people that have purchased annuities from the company.
When they started looking at the alternatives they also reviewed their current payroll bureau set up. Some forward calculations based on current sales and expected future sales showed that costs were likely to spiral out of control. Based on the assumption that the number of annuitants would go up by between 20 and 50 each month, the bureau option would soon become too expensive.
The best of both worlds
Having completed a thorough evaluation of the market, Merchant Investors selected Payrite. However, they preferred to go for a managed payroll service for staff while using an in-house system to pay the annuitants.
Due to the unique way that Payrite is made available to customers, Merchant Investors were able to take the managed service via Employer Services (ESL) and yet still have the software installed in-house, to cover both sets of requirements. This also meant that Merchant Investors gets the added bonus of having ESL’s experience on hand to help with the set up of the annuitants’ payroll operation.
As a result of the way in which pensions are administered, clients are usually paid on the anniversary of when they started their policy. This can be any day of the month. Add to this the fact that there are monthly, quarterly and annual payments, and that a client may have more than one policy and so may receive more than one payment within a pay period, you can start to see the complication. For most vendors this was too complex, and could only be achieved with a high level of manual intervention, however, ESL was confident that Payrite would cope.
Richard Simon, Payroll Manager at Merchant Investors explains:
“When we were looking for a new payroll product we saw pitches from many service providers. We cut this down to a short list of three, and invited them back to demonstrate exactly how the software would cope with certain situations that we knew we would come up against. Payrite proved to be the best option, and the fact that we can have a managed payroll service with ESL and still use the software in-house for our clients was the ideal solution.”
A flexible, smooth operation
Merchant Investors runs two payrolls currently covering over 5,500 customers. The reason for two payrolls is that the second, smaller payroll is not subject to PAYE, but there is still a need to deduct tax from them outside the scope of PAYE. The reason for setting up this second payroll is to handle changes to legislation which comes into affect from April 2007.
Pay and basic annuitant information is fed daily from the company’s main administration system into Payrite using the flat feed file utility. The details are checked and the payroll run. Details of the payrun are then fed back into the nominal ledger. A payslip is generated for every payment made and Payrite is used to produce Certificates of Deduction to inform annuitants how much tax they have paid, because non-PAYE don’t receive a P60.
Richard commented:
“The interfaces and links between Payrite® and our other corporate systems were fairly easy to set up. Rutherford Webb provided import templates, we dictated what information we needed and then ESL built the interfaces for us.”
He continued:
“Between Rutherford Webb and ESL we have been able to set up a complex operation with the minimum of fuss. The training provided by RutherfordWebb.Com has been very good and the implementation assistance provide by ESL was excellent. The two companies clearly work very well together.”
ESL runs Merchant Investors staff payroll for 110 people. ESL provides a managed service, effectively becoming the company’s payroll department. Payroll figures are available to the accounts department online so that they can view them and run management reports.
A fast return on investment
Richard sums up:
“We run daily payrolls and pay annuitants not staff. We probably use less features of Payrite than other companies, but we use it daily, processing 5,500 people per month, and produce payslips everyday. We produce P60s or Certificates of Deduction at the end of the year.”
He continued:
“We have been impressed with the way that Payrite has been able to cope with our unusual requirements. We did some ROI calculations, and whilst it is difficult to pinpoint the exact savings made, because the new payroll software coincided with other internal developments to systems, we have been surprised at just how quickly we have seen a return on investment. In addition we have greater flexibility to provide a better service to our clients and we can control our costs.”