The Cloud HR and Payroll Blog

If your labour turnover rate is high, it’s a red flag that can indicate an unhappy workforce.  This means tracking your labour turnover rate can be essential to your business’ wellbeing.  But it doesn’t stop there. You need to understand the why behind your labour turnover rate; you must get effective feedback as well as […]

by Conrad Emmett

Year-To-Date is an important metric used on payslips to show the total sums across a variety of payments. Learn more here today.

by Duane Jackson

Pension funds in the UK are in the trillions. With government regulations constantly updating to ensure this money is invested in the Paris Agreement-aligned green investment strategies, read more on how pensions and climate change are working together.

by Duane Jackson

The latest update to Staffology includes the following new features, detailed below. P11 (Detailed) Report We have added a Detailed P11 Report to the Reports section. This new report displays payments and deductions you make to employees throughout the tax year and is a useful tool for reconciliation purposes or investigating any issues. To print/download […]

by Anna Stephens

Following the acquisition of Staffology by IRIS, we are implementing several changes to help improve customer experience. The next phase of our journey is the introduction of Service Cloud. From Monday 16th August, our new customer service community (Service Cloud) will provide you with greater capabilities for self-service, product guidance and live chat. On this date, […]

by Dylan Martinez

As you can imagine there have been a fair few changes since IRIS Software acquired Staffology back in late 2020 to provide its customers with a next-generation, cloud payroll software solution. Thank you for your patience as we restructured some things to get this blog up and running again. The team has grown 1000% and will be expanding further still. Those of us […]

by Dylan Martinez

We want to hire a C# developer and an Automaton Engineer In case you missed it, we’re now a part of IRIS Software Group.Every day 335,000 UK organisations rely on IRIS payroll software to pay over 2.5 million people. Staffology is a cutting edge, API-first product and is responsible for a tiny percentage of that total, but we’ve […]

by Duane Jackson

It’s a common scenario: you’ve looked at the demonstration, you’ve played with some of the automation settings.You’ve realised Staffology really is as amazing as everyone says. But you’re cautious. It’s mid-year and you don’t want to jump in feet first. The Usual Way So often what you would do is a couple of months of “parallel runs”. […]

by Duane Jackson

One of the benefits of working with an experienced team like our new colleagues at IRIS is that they can pre-empt a lot of issues that they suspect will likely come up in the future. We’re now adding some areas of functionality to address some of them. First up is the overriding of calculated values. […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve added a couple of features around employee management that might save you some time. On Hold If you have temporary employees then you’ll be familiar with the ability to filter payruns based on employees that are being paid and those that aren’t. This works for most situations, but sometimes you want to put an […]

by Duane Jackson

We’re already integrated with many accounting software platforms. Today we’re adding one more to the list: Twinfield. Whereas the other platforms we integrate with are mainly used by SMEs, Twinfield is primarily used by some of our larger “mid market” customers. So if that’s you, you can now map nominal codes and then have journal entries automatically […]

by Duane Jackson

We’re starting to get a lot of enquiries about the ability of our software to handle payroll for IR35 and Off-Payroll Workers. We upgraded our software last year ready for the expected launch in April 2020 – so we’ve been ready for this for a while. As HMRC delayed in the introduction to April 2021 we’ve taken the opportunity […]

by Duane Jackson

Like most other payroll applications, we don’t include the Employment Allowance shown on the payrun journal. There’s good reason for this as in many potential configurations it simply shouldn’t be. A payroll developer will argue this point until he is blue in the face. But in reality, for most employers where there’s just a single payrun […]

by Duane Jackson

Typically once an accountant or payroll bureau has read about our automation features and tried the software out with one or two employers they’re sold. They then want to know how to migrate all of their other clients to us. If you have access to developers then you could use the Payroll API. But not everyone has access […]

by Duane Jackson

It can be annoying to run a large payrun – perhaps even fully-automated – and then have a failure when it comes to paying everyone due to bank details being entered incorrectly. So we’ve just introduced a feature that should reduce the chances of this happening. Whenever you are entering bank details for an employee we’ll check that they appear to […]

by Duane Jackson

It’s been a busy week in terms of improvements. Tuesday saw the release of enhancements to Accrued Holiday Pay.And yesterday we made it easier to manage P45s. Today’s update is a small one.Since very early on in our existence you’ve been able to set employee payslips to be password protected for GDPR compliance. We just took a lead from […]

by Duane Jackson

We already automatically generate P45s for employees that have left, and we make it easy for you to send them via email. What we hadn’t done – until today – is give you the ability to simply tick a box to say whether or not an employee has been issued their P45.  So now on […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve added a few enhancements to the Accrued Holiday Pay feature. Override Rate You can now override the default rate of 12.07%. You can do this either on the employer (so as to affect all employees) or you can override it on a per-employee basis. Show Balance on Payslips You can now choose to show any […]

by Duane Jackson

I really don’t like having to say “Sorry, we don’t have any support for that” when someone asks how to do something. So we’ve recently dealt with a couple of common requests…. Payment After Leaving There are specific rules about how this should be done and reported to HMRC. I’m pleased to say we’ve now […]

by Duane Jackson

We’re pleased to announce yet another addition to our growing list of integrated software. Deputy is staff management and rostering software that’s been around a while, but recently a lot of our UK customers have been mentioning it as something that they’d like to see integrated. When we took a look we could see why. It’s very […]

by Duane Jackson

As well as the more noteworthy additions such as the recent addition of overtime codes and the new CJRS report, we are also constantly adding or tweaking other smaller bits and pieces. These often don’t merit an announcement on their own, but we like to occasionally list them here in case any are of use to you, so here […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve just added support for a new type of pay code. Many of you either import hours worked from an external system or CSV file. Or you pay your employees on a salary rather than an annual rate. For the former, adding overtime and double time is easily done. But for those managing salaried employees it’s a bit […]

by Duane Jackson

After being the first to release a Furlough (CJRS) Claim report back in April, I’m pleased to say we now have an updated report to take into account the changes between now and October. The employee details page now lets you state that an employee is partially furloughed and to enter the required information about hours […]

by Duane Jackson

As an employer, you have a legal responsibility to ensure your employees have the right to work in the UK. For relatively static workforces that isn’t too difficult to manage. But we’re seeing an increasing number of employers with high numbers of temporary workers using our platform. For a large and changing workforce it can […]

by Duane Jackson

Hot on the heels of yesterdays product enhancements, we have a few more for you today. All are centered around employee management. Bulk Delete You can now delete multiple employees at once. Handy if you messed up importing employees. On the main employees list you’ll see there are now checkboxes down the side of the page. Check […]

by sam.thomas@iris.co.uk

We’re constantly adding small features and making minor tweaks to improve the product for you. Often they’re too small to warrant announcing. But here are a few of the recent changes and additions that you might find useful. Email a P45 A common request of late has been the ability to send a P45 by […]

by Duane Jackson

If you’re on our mailing list you’ll know I usually end my emails with a request to let me know about any features you need or any suggestions we can try and implement to make things easier or more efficient for you. One small request we received was to make it so you can temporarily disable the […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve supported importing time and attendance data from uAttend, TimeMoto and Access People Planner for a while.But as they don’t have APIs it’s meant fiddling with CSV files. Better than nothing, but not ideal. So I’m pleased to report that today we’ve released integration with two modern Time and Attendance platforms:RotaCloud and WeWorked. Once you’ve connected to […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve just added a new report based on requests from customers – the Variance Report. The report is intended to help you compare one period to another to identify any variations in pay as well as highlight joiners and leavers. The report has a number of options including the ability to compare a range of […]

by Duane Jackson

I noticed last week that a new user, Sarah Carter @ Rocket Software, had run a payroll in our payroll software but the FPS had failed so I got in touch to ask if I could help. Here’s the reply from Sarah:  I know why it has failed: due to me not putting the government […]

by Duane Jackson

I was asked a great question a couple of months ago: “What kind of business is Staffology not suitable for?” Our customers range from single employee firms, to payroll bureaux and accountants, to 1,000+ employee businesses, to CIS Contractors, to umbrella companies, to temp recruitment agencies. So it’s a fair question! The answer though was […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve just released a new report to help you make a claim for a furlough payment under the UK Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. We’ll walk you through the process here. It’s quite likely that HMRC will update the guidance on how we should be making calculations so we will update our system accordingly. Furlough the Employee […]

by Duane Jackson

We like automation. It saves so much time. We know you make a lot of use of the automated payroll features we offer. But it’s always been missing one piece of the jigsaw: someone has to submit the BACS file to the bank for processing. We have the option to automatically send an email to someone to […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve just added notes to Employees so that you can store extra tidbits of information. You can access the notes by choosing a employee and switching to the new Notes tab. The app itself uses our API. So everything you can do in the app you can also do programatically via the API, as such […]

by Duane Jackson

Part of the support being provided by the government due to the COVID-19 outbreak has an impact on payroll. Specifically furloughing of employees and SSP being paid from the first day of sickness. HMRC haven’t yet given any guidance on how it will reimburse employees for these costs, but we’re taking steps now to ensure […]

by Duane Jackson

Many of you have already closed 2019/20 and have moved on to 2019/21. But for those that are about to do it, here’s a little preview of what to expect.Once you’ve completed all of your payruns, where you’d normally see the button to start the next period you’ll instead see a button to start the […]

by Duane Jackson

If you’re working with Umbrella company payroll then your 2020 is off to a good start. We’re really beefing up our Umbrella features. At the beginning of the month we added CSV imports and now we’re announcing two new reports. Umbrella Statement The Umbrella Statement report allows you to select an employee and a date range to produce […]

by Duane Jackson

A new feature has just been added to help those of you managing multiple employers. We now have Employer Groups. You can set up as many groups as you like and you can then add employers to those groups. Employers can be in multiple groups, with one group being set as the primary one. Making use […]

by Duane Jackson

There’s just no escaping CSV files. They’re everywhere. We have a powerful payroll API that can do absolutely everything you can do in the payroll software itself.But to take advantage of it you need access to a developer. So the developer-deprived amongst you turn to CSV files to move data from one system to the other. We already support […]

by Duane Jackson

Thanks to how easy it is to integrate other systems in to our payroll software, we now have a number of clients that are paying employees on an ad-hoc basis. Their systems tell our systems how many hours should be paid and the rest all happens by magic. If you’re immediately paying your employee their […]

by Duane Jackson

It’s rare that we’re asked if our software can do something and the answer is ‘no’. But one of those things is daily payroll. When it comes to doing PAYE daily, it’s tricky as it’s not something HMRC recognises.A number of our customers that need this manage to get it to work using a combination […]

by Duane Jackson

We’re welcoming 2020 with the addition of a couple of new reports. Holiday Report Found in the ‘Employees’ section of the ‘Reports’ area, the Holiday Report gives you an overview of the leave allowances for all of your employees at once. You can immediately see if any employees have custom settings and how many days everyone has […]

by Duane Jackson

Unlike other blog posts, this one is going to get quite technical.If you don’t know your JSON from your XML then this one might not be for you. Importing Hours Worked When you’re integrating your platform with our payroll API, a very common requirement is to update the pay for employees – often in terms of hours […]

by Duane Jackson

We already have the ability to create departments and to add employees to a department (or multiple departments).That gives you a single level of analysis for your data which is sufficient for most of you. But many of you that are integrating platforms into us need additional levels of data analysis. Sometimes this relates to […]

by Duane Jackson

Two big features that we’ve felt we’re missing are an Employer Portal and an Employee Portal. There may only be one letter differentiating the two but they’re very different beasts. We decided to start by tackling the Employer Portal. What’s needed? From talking to those of you that wanted to give a separate login to […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve made a number of small-ish tweaks in the past month, we’ve listed some of them here. Transfer OwnershipYou can now transfer the ownership of an employer to another user. Re-send Payslip EmailsYou can now re-send the payslips emails for a payrun. So if you want to you can choose to finalise the payrun without sending the […]

by sam.thomas@iris.co.uk

A new feature we’ve just added will make life a lot easier for those of you that are managing multiple employers. You can now configure the system so that when you create a new employer it copies settings from an already existing employer. On either the employer index page or the page where you create […]

by sam.thomas@iris.co.uk

Our Cloud CIS functionality has proven remarkably popular. I didn’t realise just how little there was out there in terms of cloud-based, modern software for paying subcontractors.Even before taking into account our API, our software seems to be the most modern option. Based on requests from users we’ve added a few more features specifically for CIS Umbrella Features […]

by Duane Jackson

We’re trying to stay away from any HR functionality as there are already a lot of great products out there for that. We want to stay very focused on payroll. Managing leave and holiday allowances falls in to that fuzzy space between HR and payroll and it’s something some of you have said you really […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve just introduced global search to make it easy for you to find employers, employees or help articles from anywhere within the application. You’ve always been able to search for employers from the employer index page and for employees within a specific employer. But now you can search within all of your data from any […]

by Duane Jackson

We now have full support for payrolling benefits. This is a new(ish) method for reporting employees benefits throughout the year rather than on a P11D at the end of the year. The important part to note is that you must register with HMRC to be able to use this. And you must register before the start of […]

by Duane Jackson

Until today the CSV Importer for payments only supported importing the basic pay amount for a paylsip. You couldn’t use this tool to import additional lines to a payslip. Now you can. Simply include the employee multiple times in the CSV file. The first time the employee appears in the file will be used to set the […]

by Duane Jackson

Whilst you’ve always been able to set the basic payment to employees as being either a fixed amount, an hourly rate or a day rate – when it came to adding additional lines you only had the option to add or deduct a fixed amount. Not any more When you add a new Pay Code or edit […]

by Duane Jackson

Umbrella companies have to do some pretty complex calculations to work out how much to pay an employee. This sounded like a challenge, so we’ve started building features to make these calculations as easy as 1, 2, 3. Assumptions We’ve made a number of assumptions to get started. These include: You make a charge per […]

by Duane Jackson

Not as exciting or magical as last weeks new feature, but just as important. We’re now making it really easy to pay your employees for business miles driven in their own vehicle. You can pay employees per mile driven, and as long as it’s at or below a certain amount approved by HMRC then it’s tax-free […]

by Duane Jackson

We’ve just released a big update to the automation side of things. The options for auto emails after payruns have expanded. You previously had the ability to automatically send a Payment Summary to any email address after the Payrun had been finalised. We then got a bunch of requests for more options on these emails. […]

by Duane Jackson

Despite previously suggesting that July would be a quiet month on the development front, we’ve actually added a lot of new features. Improved Employers List With many of you now managing more than 100 employers, it became apparent you needed a better at-a-glance overview.So the main employer list now contains a few extra columns. You can now […]

by Duane Jackson

This months payroll software product additions are detailed below. There’s a lot to like! Benefits, P11D and P11D(B) You can now record benefits for employees and create and submit the required P11Ds and P11D(B) at the end of the year. Which of course we’ll do automatically for you. Read more here. HMRC Coding Notices When HMRC want […]

by Duane Jackson

If you’re already running payroll in another system then you can now easily get started with Staffology or just see what it has to offer by importing an FPS file from your current software. What’s an FPS? Every time you pay your employees your payroll software has to create a Full Payment Submission (FPS) file […]

by Duane Jackson

This month has mostly been focused on behind-the-scenes speed improvements and improved accounting integrations. Accounting Integration A journal entry will now automatically be posted to your accounting software when you finalise a payrun. As well as Sage, Quickbooks and Xero we’re also now integrated with FreeAgent, KashFlow and Reckon One. uAttend Import As well as being able to import hours worked from […]

by Duane Jackson

Another month gone and a raft of new features added to Staffology Payroll. Read on to discover what we’ve added in the last four weeks. NEST Integration We’re now fully integrated with NEST Pensions, so your pension contributions can now be automagically sent. If you’ve already created a Pension Scheme in the software and want […]

by Duane Jackson

Just because we’ve now officially launched, doesn’t mean that development has slowed down. We’ve added lots of new features in the past few weeks. Payroll Automation Not everyone has the development resources to take advantage of our Payroll API. So we’ve built a group of features that will allow you to take advantage of automation […]

by Duane Jackson

It’s official, we’re now live! This morning TechCrunch published an article announcing our existence. The first (or was it the second?) phase is now over. The hard work of getting a product to market is done. Now the hard work of getting customers to love us begins.

by Duane Jackson

The last update I posted was just before Christmas. Since then we’ve had a nice mention on AccountingWeb that ruffled a few feathers, and of course lots of progress on the software. I was aiming to get the software ready for public beta testing by the end of January and I’m pleased to say we’ve reached that […]

by Duane Jackson

I thought I’d send a final Staffology update for the year before we all wind down for a bit over Christmas There has been lots of progress in the past 3 weeks. Specifically: 1) Email We’ve gone from zero email functionality to a lot of email-related features.. You (as a brand) and individual Employers can customise […]

by Duane Jackson