Here to Help: How IRIS is supporting businesses with furloughing

how iris is supporting businesses with furloughing
By Anthony Wolny | 5th May 2020 | 14 min read

Our product and development teams have been in overdrive recently, updating our payroll offerings to ensure businesses can easily conduct the furlough process.

This has been especially important to us since it’s expected that eight out of ten businesses will furlough employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this blog, we’ll outline what the challenges are surrounding furloughing and the steps we’ve taken to ease the process.

Why has furloughing proved challenging?

Furloughing is a relatively new concept in the UK which has created a considerable amount of confusion.

But not only is it a new process, the adjoining Job Retention Scheme that relies on furloughing has also been changing quite a lot to adapt to the current circumstances.

The impact this has had on businesses is that most are not sure whether their furloughing is compliant and correct.

For more information on the Job Retention Scheme, click here.

What has IRIS been doing to support?

As previously mentioned, our product and development team have been working extremely hard to add new furloughing functionality to our solutions.

The result of their hard work is that we're now the first to market to offer fully comprehensive furloughing functionality in all of our payroll offerings.

This means that whether you’re a small business owner or a corporate organisation, we can help you simplify the process.

What functionality are we offering?

Our reactivity has resulted in a plethora of new features, including:

Recording furlough dates: You’re now able to record furlough dates directly in our payroll software, including multiple furloughing periods.

Calculating applicable pay: The Job Retention Scheme requires you to pay employees 80% of their wages up to £2,500 per month. Our new functionality enables you to quickly and easily deduce this figure for each employee.

Calculating top-ups: Included as standard is the ability to process not only the 80% furlough claim but also the 20% wage top-up should you choose to pay it.

Furlough reporting: We never underestimate the importance of data and to support we’re providing prebuilt reports on your furlough values.

Creating output claim files: To further streamline the reclaiming process you can easily pull all the information needed to claim from HMRC in one single output, directly from the software.

Picking the right IRIS product

As all our products offer furlough support, the next step is to pick the best solution to meet your needs.

For smaller businesses, KashFlow is perfect, offering a streamlined and comprehensive approach to payroll via a web-based browser which you can access at any time from anywhere.

If you’d like to try a KashFlow trial, click here.

As for mid-sized businesses, IRIS Payroll Business is a great option, providing a powerful, user-friendly, and affordable software ideal for those with up to 100 employees.

You can book a demo of IRIS Payroll Business here.

IRIS Payroll Professional is our corporate solution that can handle the trickiest requirements with ease while also ensuring compliance and accuracy.

Book a demo of IRIS Payroll Professional here and to see our entire product suite, click here.