Payroll continuity
Payroll contingency cover
Most payrolls depend on one person. If they are suddenly not there, the deadline does not move.
A standing arrangement with a bureau that already knows your payroll, ready to run it at short notice if you need us to. For employers running their own payroll on Employment Hero.
The problem nobody plans for
Most businesses between fifty and five hundred employees run payroll in house, through one person, with perhaps one other who could muddle through at a push.
That works until it does not. Illness, a resignation with four weeks’ notice, a bereavement, a family emergency. The pay date does not move, HMRC’s deadlines do not move, and your employees have mortgages going out on the first of the month.
The usual fallback is that the accountant will pick it up, or that somebody in finance will work it out. Both sound reasonable in a meeting and neither survives contact with a real pay run, because payroll is not a process you can read off a screen. It is pension assessments, salary sacrifice, attachments, statutory payments, the three people with odd arrangements, and the report finance needs by the Tuesday.
Almost none of that is written down. It is in somebody’s head, and that is exactly the head that has become unavailable.
What contingency cover actually is
It is not an emergency number. A number you ring in a crisis gets you somebody who has never seen your payroll, on the worst possible day to be learning it.
It is a standing arrangement in three parts.
Part one
We document your payroll
We spend two to three days with you and your payroll team capturing how your payroll genuinely runs. Not the version in the process map, the real one: the pay calendar, the pay elements, pension arrangements, salary sacrifice, absence and statutory payments, the approval chain, bank file formats, the reports that go to finance and when, third party outputs, and year end.
We then observe a live payroll run end to end. That consistently surfaces things no documentation exercise finds on its own.
The result is a written record detailed enough that a payroll manager who had never seen your payroll could run it correctly. You get a copy, and it is yours whatever happens next.
Part two
We stay current
This is the part that decides whether a contingency arrangement is real or just filed.
You get a named payroll manager and a named deputy, so the arrangement does not depend on one person on our side either. Your record is held in the client handbook system we maintain for every client we look after, and we review it with you every quarter to pick up what has changed in your pay elements, pension, headcount, reporting or calendar. Once a year we re check it against a live cycle, usually around year end, where the most change accumulates.
Without that, knowledge goes stale inside a year and a contingency promise becomes a promise nobody can keep.
Part three
We step in
When you activate, we run your payroll until you stand your own resource back up. We work inside your own Employment Hero environment, on your licence, as named users with permissions you set and can revoke. Nothing migrates. Your employees see no change.
The cost of activation is agreed when we set the arrangement up, so you know the number long before you need it rather than negotiating on the worst week of your year.
What we commit to
- We acknowledge an activation request within four working hours.
- Where activation reaches us at least five working days before your pay date, we run that payroll to your normal timetable.
- Inside five working days we work to best efforts, and in practice we have usually managed it.
We would rather commit to something we can keep than quote a number that sounds better in a brochure. If you are comparing providers, this is the part worth pressing everybody on.
We limit how many clients we cover
The value of this arrangement is entirely in our being genuinely available if two or three clients need us in the same month. So we hold no more than five contingency clients at any one time, and when we are full we say so and tell you when a place is likely to come up.
It is a strange thing to advertise. It is also the only honest way to sell it.
Why us
LitE Payroll has been running payroll for eleven years and looks after more than 150 payroll customers, weekly and monthly, from a handful of employees to several hundred.
We are an Employment Hero partner. Our relationship with the platform began in 2018, when it was KeyPay, and we ran our first payroll on it in 2019. Every payroll we run sits on Employment Hero, so it is the system our team is in daily rather than one of several we know a little about.
That is the whole argument. A credible promise to step into your payroll at short notice depends on familiarity you cannot acquire in a hurry.
Who this is for
It fits if you run your own payroll on Employment Hero, your payroll knowledge sits with one or two people, and you have between roughly fifty and five hundred employees.
It is not for you if you want somebody to run your payroll routinely. That is a different service and often a better answer, and you can read about it here.
We cover Employment Hero payrolls only. We are not going to tell you we can step into a platform our team does not use every week, because the promise would not be worth anything.
What it costs
| What | Price |
|---|---|
| Documenting your payroll, including a shadowed live run | from £1,950 one off |
| Standby retainer, including quarterly reviews and an annual re check | from £195 a month |
| Activation, per payroll run we process | agreed at setup |
All prices plus VAT. Activation is priced when we set the arrangement up, so you know the figure in advance rather than negotiating it in the middle of a crisis.
The retainer is set by the complexity of the payroll being covered rather than by headcount alone. What moves it: the number of pay frequencies, how much sits outside the system in spreadsheets, salary sacrifice and benefits arrangements, the number of third party outputs, and how often your payroll changes shape.
We will tell you the figure after the first conversation, not after three.
The retainer runs for an initial twelve months, then rolls, with sixty days’ notice at any time thereafter. No multi year tie in and no exit fee.
Questions we get asked
Do you need access to our system?
We ask to be set up as named users in your own Employment Hero environment, with permissions you decide and can revoke at any moment. We prefer that to holding shared logins, because it keeps your audit trail intact and keeps you in control of what we can see.
What if we never activate it?
Then you have paid for insurance you did not need, and you have a fully documented payroll that you did not have before. Most clients find the documentation worth having on its own.
Can you cover part of the payroll rather than all of it?
Yes. Some clients want the whole run covered, others only the parts that are hardest to hand over. We scope it with you.
What about year end?
If an activation runs across year end, the statutory work including P60s and P11Ds is quoted at the time. We will not surprise you with it.
Do you try to take the payroll over permanently?
No. If you decide you would rather outsource after all we are happy to talk, but that is your decision to raise and not ours to engineer. The arrangement is designed to hand your payroll back.
How quickly can it be set up?
Normally three to four weeks from the first conversation, because we want to observe a live run before we call it ready.
Worth a conversation before you need one
Half an hour on the phone is usually enough to tell you whether this is worth doing and roughly what it would cost. If your payroll is simpler than you think, we will say so.