An HR and payroll system that gives SDL Surveying the freedom to build their way

SDL Surveying, a UK property surveying firm with around 250 employees, cut its monthly payroll processing time from roughly two weeks to a few hours after switching to IRIS Cascade HRi in 2022. SDL Surveying's HR team now build their own reports and screens and have introduced automated sickness absence alerts to support its largely field-based workforce.

SDL Surveying is a specialist property surveying firm that has transformed how it manages payroll and HR since adopting IRIS Cascade in 2022. What used to be a two-week monthly scramble to get payroll right is now wrapped up in a few hours, and the five-person HR team now builds its own reports and system screens in-house.

SDL Surveying split from SDL Group in 2019. The move gave HR and Payroll Manager, Rachel Fitzgerald and her team, who had inherited their existing system, a natural opportunity to look for something that actually worked for a business of around 250 people.

A system that charged for every report

Before Cascade, SDL Surveying used another HR and Payroll system that caused more headaches than it should. The team had access to a single report, endlessly refiltered to extract whatever information they needed, and every new report or system change had to be paid for.

Sickness absence was tracked entirely by hand against a 25-day policy threshold, and getting payroll right took six to eight report iterations most months.

Rachel tells us, “When I joined SDL Surveying, I came from using quite an advanced piece of HR software to one that was incredible manual. It required a lot of intervention to make sense of the data, and we were very limited in what we could do. Payroll took roughly two weeks each month and caused a lot of pain! As soon as we had the introduction call with IRIS and saw Cascade, we knew it was the system we needed.”

Our survey says: IRIS Cascade

The team looked at one other system before choosing Cascade, ruling it out for its dated, unintuitive employee interface. Rachel found Cascade struck the right balance: enough flexibility to configure without needing a dedicated system administrator.

She tells us, “I knew the system I had used previously wouldn’t work for our size at SDL, and when I saw Cascade, I just knew it was the right platform. Integrated HR and Payroll was important for us, and the customisable workflows and screens that allow us to configure the system to our own processes was exactly what we were looking for. The centralised reporting using real-time employee data and alerts on things like sickness and absence, without needing to request custom reports from our provider, was another big highlight for us.”

"Even small things like when an employee hits a five or ten year milestone anniversary, we've got the system set up to email the manager so they know, and a little bit of a fuss can be made. Those little touches mean a lot to employees, and Cascade makes it easy.”

Payroll: from two weeks of back-and-forth to a few hours

One of the clearest impacts of moving to IRIS Cascade has been on payroll. Where the team previously needed roughly two weeks of iteration between cut-off and pay day, often across several separate reports, they now rarely need more than two or three payroll runs.

“Payroll was a real challenge for us, and the fact that we’ve managed to go from spending two weeks to a few hours, speaks volumes,” says Rachel.

Freedom to build the right reports and screens

Cascade's report-building and screen-building tools let the team create exactly what they need without going back to a provider or paying per change. SDL Surveying has built custom screens for company car and parking fine tracking, one-to-one meeting logs for managers, and its own payroll reporting, to name just a few.

Rachel tells us, “If you were to tell me we were losing the ability to self-build our own screens and reports tomorrow, that would be the biggest loss for me! It means we can respond to regulatory change on our own timeline. When HMRC required benefit-in-kind data to be reported through the system (replacing P11Ds), we didn't have to wait on IRIS to build anything for us, we built the screens we needed ourselves. Facilities use Cascade to track company cars and parking fines centrally; managers use it to log one-to-ones; and we in the HR team have built sickness absence triggers on top of standard reporting. We are in full control, and the system supports us in whatever problem we need to solve.”

Cascade comes out on top

Asked whether she'd recommend Cascade to a similar business, Rachel didn’t hesitate. “I think the biggest selling point for me is just the freedom you have within the system — the fact that you can set up whatever you need, whenever you need it. The flexibility and freedom that you get with the reporting leads to better HR strategies, real-time data and error-proof HR and payroll. I would absolutely recommend it to other organisations.”