Paycheck Plus

Paycheck Plus wanted a payments engine with an easy-to-use platform to power their expanding payroll service, allowing them to cut administration time in the process. 

About Paycheck Plus

Paycheck Plus is a payroll provider for global companies with payroll requirements in the UK and Ireland. With 450 clients spread across the world, processing approximately 26,000 pay slips per month, Paycheck Plus clients trust them with 650 million euros worth of payroll payments per year.

In May 2022, Paycheck Plus was acquired by IRIS Software Group, meaning their team needed to rapidly expand its capabilities as new clients came on board.

The Challenges

The challenges could be broken into two key areas – 1) The need for a more efficient and automated payroll process and 2) improving the overall client experience.

When it came to an efficient process, The Paycheck Plus finance team had been doing a lot of manual work. Much of the payment processing was done through Excel sheets, and the systems they were using were disconnected from each other, resulting in lots of queries from both their own and the client side.

Data exchange was happening via email rather than on an integrated system, and the team had to have several checks along the payroll process to ensure no errors had crept in and payroll would be accurate and on-time.

“Up until last year, we were sending secure file transfers on Excel spreadsheets to TransferMate via email’ said Áine Crawley, Regional Operations Manager at Paycheck Plus. ‘It resulted in a lot of manual work – not just filling in the data, but also because we had to have several manual checks along the way to ensure there were no errors.”

This method of using Excel was becoming fraught with difficulties, and the team knew that they had to transition to a new, upgraded solution.

“Like every Excel document, it grew and grew the more clients we had and the more nuance they needed. We found it expanding tab by tab, and the bigger it got the more we knew that we had to reign it in and find something better. Our client base was growing, so our capabilities needed to grow with it.”

The client experience was also an area the team wanted to significantly improve. There were real challenges around visibility of payroll funds flow, so there were often messages being sent back and forth from either the Paycheck Plus team requesting to know whether the funds had been approved and released, and also the client wanting to check on payment status. The process also meant producing client reports was another difficult, manual task.

“We were constantly having to ask clients the question, “Did you transfer the funds? Is everything okay?”. We built in many contingencies to ensure that payroll would go out accurately and on-time, but in the old system some aspects of the process were essentially invisible to us, so the only solution was to always check, check, and check again.”

The Solution

In 2022, the Paycheck Plus team moved to TransferMate’s online payment portal for their payroll processing. This single decision allowed the team to realign how they process payroll for their clients and meet all their existing challenges.

1. Creating efficiencies and reducing administration time

The implementation of the portal removed or automated several steps from the process, gave the Paycheck Plus team more control, and significantly cut the time it took to process each payment.  

“We were now able to book the payments ourselves, rather than sending them to TransferMate to be processed there. We now import payments directly into the portal, removing that manual manipulation and the risk of error. We import as much as we can into the portal.”

This automation and control have meant cutting the amount of time it takes to process each payment by 66%.  

“To put hard numbers on it, our old process took an hour and 12 minutes – we’ve now cut that down to 25 minutes. By using TransferMate, and reorganizing our processes around its capabilities, we’ve added 20 - 30% capacity on the payroll team.”

The portal immediately got rid of the need for Excel spreadsheets, with all data sitting on one, integrated platform.

“We love the portal. It’s straightforward, you can’t click the wrong button, and it all works in sequence. I got the initial training from TransferMate, then I began training the team internally. After implementing five clients that first month we could immediately see the benefits, and we couldn’t roll it out to our entire client base fast enough.”

2. Improving the client experience

With all this technology and infrastructure, the Paycheck Plus team were able to make giant leap forwards in the client experience too. For Paycheck Plus clients, TransferMate has meant quicker, smoother, more cost-effective payment processing.

‘It’s allowed us to reduce the time it takes to process client payroll every month by a number of days through the reverse wire, wire transfer and direct debit capabilities. Essentially, clients used to have to submit their payroll two days earlier than they have to now, so we can give them back that time each payroll cycle to get themselves aligned.”

While Paycheck Plus still build in contingencies to allow for unforeseen events, the TransferMate partnership gives them the flexibility and agility to support their clients if any issue arises. This enhanced capability is not simply for minor obstacles, it can come through in moments of crisis too.

“Over the last number of weeks, we've seen huge upset in the American and the US bank and market, and we had a number of clients that was affected by the Silicon Valley bank collapse. But by having that contingency built in, and the capabilities to go with it, we were able to come up with a solution before payday and before the employees were affected.”

It also allowed the Paycheck Plus team to provide better data to their clients for their own reconciliation and auditing purposes.

“Now the client approves their payroll, we book the payments on the portal, and we give them a PDF document with the information, a summarised version that has what they need. It shows the references for the transfer, the bank details that it's coming from, and the bank details that it's going to. So that allows for an audit trail with a full breakdown of the transactions that are booked. You can't tamper with it. It's time and date stamped, and it's there for the client's visibility.”

While compliant, accurate and on-time payroll are the foundation stones for any payroll process, leveraging TransferMate’s global payments infrastructure has resulted in more cost-effective payments for clients too.

“The portal allows clients to get the most efficient currency exchange rates at the time of payment. It provides a report to the client showing them a breakdown of the FX rates, the value of the payment, the domestic and foreign currency – it makes everything easy to understand and easy to track.”

The Final Word

“TransferMate have become a huge part of our payments process, bringing real benefits to both our team and to our clients, and it’s been a key enabler for our growth over the last 12 months.”

Áine Crawley, Regional Operations Manager, Paycheck Plus

If you want to learn more about how TransferMate can power your payroll process, contact the team today.