The RACS Group

RACs Group offer umbrella payroll services to a range of contractors including supply teachers and consultants.  The business was set-up in 2007 and they initially chose to use IRIS PAYE-Master after being impressed with the IRIS team.  

As the company has grown over the years they have moved through the IRIS range, moving to IRIS Payroll Professional in 2009 and upgrading to the flagship Earnie IQ payroll system in 2012.

Martin Polden, Payroll Director at RACS Group, explains why they have decided to stay with IRIS as the business as grown:

“We have a good relationship with IRIS and are confident the software will work in the way we need.   Our business has expanded over the years and now have around 20,000 live contractors on Earnie IQ.  The power and robustness of the system means we have no worries about handling such a large volume of employees.  Moving to Earnie IQ was also a straightforward process which was project managed by the IRIS team.  Everything went smoothly so we were up and running on Earnie IQ on schedule.”

“One of the key reasons for choosing Earnie IQ over other payroll solutions was the flexibility of the payroll software.   Dealing with contractors means we don’t always get the timesheet information submitted on time and can often need to pay 2 weeks together.  Other providers struggled with this but the Earnie team fully understood what we needed so that contractors get their full tax and NI thresh-holds.  This is vital for ensuring our contractors are not out of pocket.”

The RACS Group have managed to streamline Earnie IQ to work with their other business systems and internal processes as Martin explains:

“We import the gross pay information into Earnie using a clock-in file.  It goes directly into the payroll run and Earnie then works out what the net pay should be and handles all the RTI submissions. We have our own bespoke system for BACS payments to contractors and Earnie IQ creates an export file to go directly into this software.”

Martin has also been impressed with how the Earnie system has been tailored to the RACS Group specific requirements:

“Although we have 20,000 contractors on the system we will typically only pay around 5,000 in a period.  Developers at IRIS worked with us to adapt Earnie so that any employees not on the clock-in file are automatically put on hold and are not included in the payroll run and calculations.  This has saved us around 1.5 hours each period which is a significant amount of time.”  

“I would have no hesitations in recommending Earnie to other Umbrella companies.  It is simple to use and the flexibility of the payroll software means it can be adapted to the specific requirements of this industry.  I can’t actually remember the last time I needed to speak to the support team which is a testament to how good the software is”