Belmont Group Case Study

Emma Paton, Group Personnel Manager of Belmont Group is responsible for the payroll and has been for the last 5 years. Emma explained that they used to have a standalone payroll department until the company restructured and the payroll was amalgamated into her job role. This gave Emma a payroll to manage with over 200 employees across 9 car dealerships on top of her already busy day-to-day tasks.

Belmont Group used a Dealership Management System (DMS) since the late 90’s and made the decision as a company to move away from that DMS. Their payroll came as a module as part of this software and moving onto a new DMS consequently meant that they were in need of new payroll software that would provide better integration and ease of use.

Running the payroll for 200 employees across a number of different dealerships, Emma quickly realised that they would need a piece of software that could easily handle this volume as well as generate the necessary reports and information needed for day-to-day business decisions.

The move to a new DMS prompted a review of the payroll process and initial inspection found their existing payroll software to not be as straightforward as they would have liked it to be. In addition to this, Emma explained that there were various different modules included within the payroll software that increased the administrative burden of inputting information into the software

Emma chose IRIS because the pricing for Earnie Executive works on a very simple basis that allowed Emma to choose a plan based on the amount of employees that the software would process.

In addition to this, she also chose Earnie Executive because IRIS are a HMRC approved payroll provider. When she was deciding on the software that they wanted to use, they decided against an alternative software provider early on in the process because they were unhappy with the nature of the pricing structure.

Emma explained that “we had a demonstration with an alternative provider but it wasn’t really what we were looking for. It appeared to be too basic and couldn’t handle the complexity of our payroll.” Emma explained that “we took the online demonstrations of Earnie Executive which helped us to see why we should adopt the software.”

Implementation

When implementing Earnie Executive, Emma was visited onsite by an IRIS consultant that helped to set up the payroll software including the IRIS AE Suite™ (The IRIS auto enrolment solution that automatically assesses employees’ eligibility for workplace pensions as well as distributing payslips and P60s electronically). Emma was pleased with this set up because it was completed effectively and efficiently by the IRIS consultant.

Time saving

Since adopting Earnie Executive, Emma explains that “Earnie Executive has certainly streamlined our processes and it will continue to help streamline our processes even further as we become more confident with the use of the software and the different aspects that are a part of it.”

Emma went on to explain that “Earnie Executive has definitely saved us at least one day per month because we no longer have to manually input the payroll data once we receive it. Now we can just import it into the software using the Spreadsheet Import Module.”

Auto Enrolment

Emma explained that they initially began their auto enrolment journey by running a costing analysis and putting a plan together for how they would deal with it. This was done well in advance as recommended by The Pensions Regulator (TPR). As a result, Emma has taken on the IRIS AE Suite™ which automatically assesses employees for auto enrolment with each payroll run as well as distributes payslips and P60s electronically (IRIS OpenPayslips) and publishes pension letter communications to the cloud for employees to access. This ensures that Belmont Group comply with the legislation and isn’t met by fines from TPR.

Support

When it comes to support and dealing with their account manager, Emma explained that they have a good relationship with their account manager who fully understands their business needs, making it easier to work with them.

Would you recommend IRIS?

Emma explained that “Yes, once you get to know the software you’ll find that it is easy to navigate, great to use and saves us at least one day per month.”