Payroll insight
Neil Tonks, of MHR’s legislation team, provides insight about how the team go about developing the payroll product It’s all about change W e’re currently bringing a couple of new starters into our team. As part of their induction, we for the chosen path to be the simplest. It’s gratifying that the government departments involved will often take our suggestions on board, provided they don’t conflict with the policy aim set by their ministers. Recently, a new type of meeting has
and research team, both from their various publications and also by the direct communication we have with them. Most CIPP members probably don’t realise the huge amount of work the team do in the background, but we certainly do. So, that’s legislative changes dealt with. The other sort of change is market- driven, to keep our product competitive. We continually need to ask the question ‘How do we make our users’ lives better?’ What we mean here goes beyond the obvious answers around speed, accuracy and usability. We need to consider not just how the system supports our customers’ processes, but how it can improve them. This involves some ‘out of the box’ thinking, and a lot of talking to payroll people. MHR has a large payroll outsourcing operation, which gives us ready access to payroll teams processing everything from small employers to those with payrolls of many thousands – this is a great resource for us. We also run our equivalent of ‘round tables’, where we’ll get customers interested in a specific topic together to explore it in depth. Conferences are another source of information. These serve the dual purpose of providing a learning opportunity as well as the chance to talk with payroll professionals from around the country and overseas – after all, payroll is a global profession and many of the challenges are also global. With all this going on, you might wonder where we find time to actually help develop any software. To be honest we ask ourselves that from time to time! The one thing our jobs definitely are not, is routine. n
take them through the ways in which we ensure our payroll product stays up to date, both in terms of new legislation and changing market expectations. We thought it would be useful to highlight some of this to you, too, so you have an insight into the kind of work involved in ensuring changes ‘just happen’ for you. Many changes over the past few years have been driven by government requirements, so the need to keep up with the pace of legislative change is paramount. This involves meetings – lots of them – many of which are regular consultation forums between software developers and civil servants. Some are hosted by government departments such as HM Revenue & Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions and The Pensions Regulator, while others are under the auspices of professional bodies such as the British Computer Society. In addition, there are ad hoc meetings which deal with a specific upcoming change. This year, for instance, there have been several on the topics of the apprenticeship levy, the reporting of gender pay gaps and the demise of electronic data interchange as a means of making real time information submissions. All these things will feed into software or procedural changes over the next twelve to eighteen months. These meetings are an invaluable source of information and also give us the opportunity to contribute to the process of working out the detail of new initiatives. There are often multiple ways of achieving change and we always press
arrived on the scene, in the form of CIPP ‘round table’ events. These allow people with a common interest to get together and discuss a topic. We’ve attended, or hosted, several and found them very useful. The topics have included the possibility of payrolling beneficial loans, tax simplification, and the vexed question of holiday pay and what it should consist of. These events are open to all CIPP members and are well-worth attending if you can. ...we always press for the chosen path to be the simplest Reading is another important part of the process. We study many documents ranging from official guidance to magazine articles. We even have to resort to reading laws occasionally, which is not exactly fun but is important as these are, of course, the final word on the rules of an initiative. Software developers have dedicated contact points within various government departments and we get a lot of assistance this way. Civil servants often seem faceless but we find most of the individuals we come across to be knowledgeable and keen to help. Last, but certainly not least, we get a lot of assistance from the CIPP’s policy
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Issue 26 | December 2016/January 2017
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
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