Rylands Nursing Home Case Study

Rhonda Smyth, Administrator of Rylands Nursing Home has been with the company for 11 years. Rhonda’s wide ranging role for the business means that she has a lot to do on a day to day basis as well as running a payroll for 80 staff consisting of part time, full time and relief staff; all paid monthly.

When asked about the day to day usage of IRIS Payroll Professional, Rhonda explains “I have absolutely no problems at all. On the whole, it is straightforward which is essential when running a busy office.” She also goes on to say that “running payroll without IRIS Payroll Professional would be impossible due to the savings in time it provides us.”

Auto enrolment

“We weren’t too perturbed by auto enrolment when we were first informed of it by The Pensions Regulator, as they notify well in advance of your staging date. However, as it got closer and we looked at working with one of the bigger pension providers to try and find out more information, it became quite an overwhelming prospect.”

Rhonda continued on to say that “it was only until we approached our staging date that I realised how much extra work auto enrolment would take me. The responsibility for setting up and administering auto enrolment fell to me and I didn’t feel like I personally was adequately equipped both in terms of knowledge and expertise. This is where both IRIS and The People’s Pension were of immeasurable help to me.

Rylands Nursing Home staged on 1st July 2014 and they started planning for auto enrolment about 9 - 12 months before they reached their staging date. Rhonda explained that “I am not someone from a pension’s background and had not operated a pension scheme previously so this was all very much new ground. Working in a Health Care environment also presents further challenges when administering a pension scheme as high staff turnover and use of relief staff can create a continuous need for communication regarding pensions.”

When asked if Rhonda could ever envisage running their auto enrolment manually, she replied “no, we definitely could not. It would be much too time-consuming.”

The IRIS AE Suite™

“With us being in Northern Ireland, having a remote configuration of the software was great because the software was all set up for us, we were shown how to use it and then there was little to do after that.”

When asked about the benefits of the IRIS AE Suite™ Rhonda explained: “I just simply couldn’t do auto enrolment without it. That is the easiest way to put it. It would be too labour intensive to do auto enrolment manually. With the amount that you have to do, it would take up a huge amount of time, it is just not an option.”

When it comes to the IRIS AE Suite™, Rhonda currently uses the pension communications part of it. She says that it is very good for her and Rylands Nursing Home because of the amount of employees that they have and the nature of the high staff turnover, it makes it easy to send the right communications to the right employees at the right time.

IRIS Support

“Dealing with the Support team has been very good. I have been dealing with the same person in Support which has been great because it has meant that I haven’t had to re-explain queries to different support team members.”

Recommend the IRIS AE Suite™

“Yes, I would recommend the IRIS AE Suite™ no doubt about it. Especially now because it is so straightforward to use. I recommend the IRIS AE Suite™ to businesses of our size and in particular our industry. In terms of the electronic communications, they are essential because the programme automatically creates and sends as required.”

The People’s Pension

“Dealing with The People’s Pension has been a very positive experience made easier by the fact you have a great setup with them yourselves. It is very straightforward and they always have the answers to any questions I may have. “

“Some pension companies require you to have a minimum amount of monthly pension contributions however The People’s Pension didn’t, which helped us a lot. We chose The People’s Pension after gaining advice from a pension adviser.”

“We have no problem uploading our pension file to The People’s Pension or even exporting the file from the IRIS AE Suite™.”

“It is so easy for us to get in touch with The People’s Pension if we need to and we would definitely recommend them to other businesses.”

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