Greenhalgh’s Craft Bakery

Greenhalgh’s Craft Bakery was established as a small family business over 50 years ago. Since then it has expanded to include over 900 employees in 62 shops across the Northwest as well as its main bakery in Bolton.

With such a large employee base and variety of overtime rates, payroll staff were often losing time manually checking data from Time and Attendance software before paying staff. Because of this, a key requirement for Greenhalgh’s was for the information from its Time and Attendance system to populate its payroll software to prevent duplication of effort.

Greenhalgh’s had encountered issues with its previous payroll systems, especially in the run up to year-end. With the imminent roll out of Real Time Information (RTI), the company wanted to ensure its payroll systems would not fail. 

RTI is widely regarded as the biggest change to payroll since PAYE was introduced in 1944 and will affect over 1.4 million businesses from April 2013. Under the new legislation employers will be required to submit records to HMRC each time they run a payroll, instead of just annually at year-end.

Dean Simpson, IT manager at Greenhalgh’s, found that choosing Earnie IQ was easy, commenting: “We had used another Earnie system for our office payroll and had no problems. Combine this with the ease of use and excellent customer support and it was a very easy decision when it came to choosing the software for our bakery and shops.”

IRIS Software Group, who provides Earnie IQ, has been participating in the HMRC RTI pilot scheme and Dean stated this was another key factor in his decision adding: “We were confident that Earnie IQ would be able to handle the new RTI requirements and have booked RTI training with IRIS Software Group for our staff. We feel that with IRIS’ support, we should have no trouble complying with the new legislation.”

Employees use swipe cards at machines which populate Greenhalgh’s Time and Attendance (T&A) systems. T&A systems improve the efficiency of timekeeping, allowing employees to clock their working hours which can then be formatted into an export file which can be directly configured to populate payroll software. T&A systems are often implemented in multi-site companies with complex payrolls, as it saves re-entering data and ensures accuracy when paying employees.

After implementing Earnie IQ, Greenhalgh’s can directly import this data into its payroll system, saving up to an entire working day in time and vastly reducing paperwork.

Dean was very impressed with the range of reports available for any situation stating: “We like to send out birthday cards to all of our employees, so being able to pull up reports with data like employee date of births at the click of a button is a huge help.” 

Earnie IQ enables staff at Greenhalgh’s to get accurate employee costs for each shop, through links to its bespoke account system. This integration was easily established using Earnie IQ’s simple utilities and interfaces.

Dean would not hesitate in recommending Earnie IQ to other businesses, concluding: “The software is intuitive and easy to use. Even when one of our payroll operators was on holiday, the other operator was able to run the entire payroll seamlessly in their absence. The support received from IRIS Software Group has been fantastic and any queries we have had have been answered in a knowledgeable and timely manner. We previously had some worries regarding year-end and RTI, but with Earnie IQ we’re sure we’ll have no trouble.”