Long-time Quill client, Armstrong & Co Solicitors in London, first began using Quill’s outsourced payroll service in 2013. To support company growth, the practice recently recruited an in-house cashier and started doing its own payroll for a short period.
As the practice also subscribes to Quill’s Pinpoint outsourced legal cashiering service and Interactive practice management software, its own cashier supplemented its Quill cashier.
“We decided to task our new cashier with running our payroll on Sage,” states Imran Khawaja, Managing Partner at Armstrong & Co. “It was all going swimmingly as a combined back office support structure with Quill until our cashier left. Subsequently, we struggled to keep managing payroll ourselves for a while but it was simply too much effort for other staff members to cope with the extra burden of work. As a result, we turned back to Quill. This entire episode took place over only four to five months.
“We could have replaced our cashier but we didn’t deem this a necessary expense as their main task is logging e-chits onto Interactive for our Pinpoint cashier to action, which we’re perfectly able to do ourselves by sharing the load between our staff. We could also have allocated our payroll duties to our accountants, as they offer this service, but Quill had run it so efficiently beforehand, it made much more sense to simply outsource to its payroll bureau again.
“As we’re fairly new payroll clients, albeit for the second time round, we’re still in the process of bringing our data up-to-date such as all our pension details. We anticipate being fully up-and-running in next to no time though.”
Commenting on Pinpoint and Interactive, Imran explains:
“Quill’s outsourcing services and software help us to work better as a firm. We enter daily e-chits onto Interactive and Quill picks up from there. In terms of distribution of workload to perform the cashier role, it’s around a 20/80 split with Quill doing the lion’s share. It’s a huge time saver.
“Another significant benefit is SRA Accounts Rules compliance which is a foremost consideration for every single law firm in operation today. With a qualified external person checking our accounts, in the form of our Quill cashier, our own employees don’t have to go out of their way to keep up with the rules.
“The Interactive software itself is excellent. It’s extremely intuitive so managing ledgers and searching is easy. Reports too are straightforward. We can click on a few buttons and get meaningful insights. To top it all, support is responsive. It’s a complete package. I’ve actually used Quill’s software when I’ve been employed elsewhere. That’s the reason we chose Quill.”
In his concluding statement about returning to Quill for outsourced payroll support, Imran says:
“Where payroll and pension regulations are concerned, you can either take a view to employ a knowledgeable person for the role or outsource to the experts. There are constant changes to legislation yet compliance is absolutely mandatory. By outsourcing, it’s plain sailing. Compliance is assured. We’re living proof of how outsourcing’s best to operate the payroll function. We recommend Quill for the job!”
