At Quill, its doors are always left wide open for any clients who leave. Experience has taught Quill that departed clients often quickly learn that the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence. That’s exactly what happened with Sefton Park Medical Centre.
As part of a streamlining process, Sefton Park Medical Centre chose to combine accountancy and payroll resources with its accountants, and cancelled Quill’s outsourced payroll support. After a month, the practice returned as Quill Payroll users.
Simon Turton, Practice Manager at Sefton Park Medical Centre, explains: “Whilst we’ve always had strong relationships with everyone at Quill, we undertook a business refresh exercise as a means of becoming more efficient. The majority of our decisions led to improvements. Cancelling Quill, however, turned out to be a wrong decision but, thankfully, was reversible.
“Changing our minds and going live again with Quill Payroll was a non-issue. Our payroll clerks at Quill, Nancy and Sophie, were sad when we said goodbye and have warmly welcomed us back without any grudges.”
In the four weeks absent from Quill, what hadn’t been appreciated was the added value offered by an accredited Bacs bureau which can transfer salaries directly from employer to employees’ bank accounts.
“When the omission in our accountants’ service came to light, we faced a choice of extra administration internally or outsourcing the salary transfer function to another third party in order to pay our staff,” continues Simon. “Doing so would add to our costs which goes against our whole business refresh arrangements. We chose the former and manually processed our salary run a day overdue as a one-off activity.
“Having identified this anomaly, we subsequently contacted our Quill Payroll clerk for help, secure in the knowledge that not only is Quill more cost effective overall and handles payroll duties in their entirety, we also have complete assurance that our employees’ confidential salary information is in the safe hands of a Bacs-registered company. We switched seamlessly back to outsourced payroll support from Quill for the next month.”
Payroll is one facet of all businesses which never stands still. Even more so currently with furloughed and long-term absent employees, as well as constant changes regarding leavers, starters and salary adjustments. Despite having been away from Quill for only one month, Sefton Park Medical Centre’s staffing structure and accompanying payroll had altered in the interim.
“We recruited new members and implemented pay rises in the first month back at Quill,” adds Simon. “Of course, none of these changes were any trouble to Nancy and the gang, even when given at the eleventh hour. In fact, it was a somewhat messy handover because we modified the format of our reports. We described our reporting requirements, largely relating to excluding doctors from our pension reports, and our requests were put into action immediately. Everything was taken in its stride.”
In his concluding statement, Simon compliments Quill Payroll for expert management of Sefton Park Medical Centre’s payroll past, present and future: “Quill knows our history and the service boundaries are clear. It makes working together easy. Being back, I have peace of mind that our payroll’s under control, reports are accurate and salaries are paid on time without fail.
“We’ve used Quill Payroll for a number of years previously and are delighted to be on board again now. The whole service is straightforward. Once staff are set up, each month we email through any changes such as overtime and the like. Within two days, we receive an email back containing copies of payslips, payroll summaries and pension details. Hard copy payslips arrive in the post shortly afterwards. Quill manages our ever-changing payroll, complicated pensions, end-of-year tasks and ongoing legislation updates. The service comes highly recommended.”
