If the shoe fits: FitFlop brings payroll in-house and automates HR admin with IRIS Cascade 

FitFlop, a footwear brand with around 250 employees across nine countries, uses IRIS Cascade to run payroll in-house and automate HR processes. The reward team now runs payslips, P45s and draft net pay calculations itself in seconds. Annual pay review letter production and distribution takes half a day instead of 3 days, and work from anywhere requests are fully automated and approved entirely within Cascade. 

FitFlop, the comfort-engineered footwear brand founded in 2007, employs around 250 people across nine countries, roughly 170 of them in the UK. This year, its reward team has brought payroll in-house on IRIS Cascade HRi and started automating HR processes that once took days of manual effort. 

Finding the right fit from managed service to in-house payroll 

Cliff Harding, Head of Reward at FitFlop, looks after pay and benefits for all nine countries. Having worked with numerous HR and payroll systems at more than 60 organisations in his career (he used to be an interim limited company), he has plenty to compare it with. Cascade was already in place at FitFlop when he arrived, but he has no plans to move away from it. 

“I’ve used a heck of a lot of different systems, HR and payroll, and both integrated. Nothing’s like Cascade out there. I absolutely love it and I’ll sing its praises from the rooftops,” Cliff says. 

This year, FitFlop moved its payroll from a managed service to in-house. Under the old model, the team sent its data and waited for the payroll to be run and the reports returned, so Cliff’s schedule depended on someone else’s. With a short window to complete payroll and nine countries to look after, he wanted to input the data, check it and move on. 

“It’s a million times improvement on the managed payroll service,” he says. “I run my payroll, I input it, I check it straight away, I can model the possible in seconds (very handy when changing employee pension contributions). That entire process has removed any blockers.” 

In-house payroll has also changed how the team handles one-off requests. Where FitFlop once had to specify, submit and pay for a gross-to-net calculation, such as the effect of a bonus on someone’s take-home pay, the team can now run draft payslips, payslips and P45s itself. “I can now do it within seconds,” Cliff says. “Bringing payroll back into our team has been a huge game changer for us.” 

Reports that hit the ground running 

For any HR team, reporting is where the data held in the system turns into decisions. Turnover, absence, headcount and diversity figures show where problems are building up, so leaders can act early, and statutory reporting such as gender pay gaps needs to be accurate and quick to produce. With IRIS Cascade, HR and payroll share one centralised database, so the data is consistent.  

Just as important is how easy it is to get the information out and make sense of it. Cliff tells us, “The ability to create your own screens and automate what sits behind it is phenomenal. I’ve worked with other HR providers where you get given a set of reports, and if you want more, that comes with an expensive price tag. You end up doing most of the work anyway in specifying what you want and it most probably will be 3 reports that require merging into one because of “tables”. The reporting functionality and the flexibility within the system is a real highlight of Cascade for us.”  

Automation that puts a spring in your step 

Training from IRIS has shown Cliff how much more Cascade can do beyond its standard setup. The clearest example is the annual pay review and bonus cycle, which both need a personalised letter for every employee. Previously, that meant a mail merge, splitting the output, converting each letter to PDF, passing them to line managers and uploading each one by hand. 

Now, Cascade generates each letter and saves it to the employee’s documents automatically. Last year, distributing the pay review letters took three days; with Cascade it took half a day, and the bonus scheme has been handled the same way. “The system produces the letter, and it saves the letter itself automatically into employee documents,” Cliff explains. “It’s opened my eyes to the possible.” 

The team has since applied the same thinking to its work from anywhere process, which used to run through a spreadsheet and needed the People team to review each request, check with the line manager and relay the decision. Employees now submit everything on one screen in Cascade, line managers approve or reject within the system, and the employee is notified automatically = no admin! 

“The entire process has been simplified. It’s all managed within the system, and it works perfectly. I’ve got a million of these processes that I want to try and get working in this way, so that our time can be spent more wisely,” Cliff says. 

Support that goes the extra mile  

Cliff credits much of the progress to the IRIS trainer who worked with the FitFlop team this year and helped them tailor Cascade to the way FitFlop works. “The team at IRIS know that system inside out. The level of training and the information we’ve received has been phenomenally good,” he says. FitFlop also meets monthly with its IRIS account managers to review what is new in the product and to work through any challenges. 

Cliff is clear about the value of having a named contact: “Having a key account manager has been really important to us, because if things go wrong, I’ve got someone I can go to who I know will get it sorted. We have a really strong relationship now which means we’re getting the most out of the system.” 

Advice for other businesses ready to take the next step 

Asked what he would say to another organisation considering Cascade, Cliff keeps it simple: “Do it! It’s extreme value for money. I look at my annual fees now, and for what I pay and what I get, I cannot replicate that anywhere else. I know I can’t. I highly recommend Cascade.”