Accounting firms · 🇬🇧 United Kingdom
140 payrolls, one person, every month
A single-point-of-failure payroll function with RTI obligations on every payday and no cover.
UK accountancy practice, 9 staff, 140 payroll clients. Client identity withheld — we publish names only with written permission, so this engagement is described by its shape rather than by who it was.
140
Payrolls supported
0
Late RTI submissions
2
People who can now run it
The situation
- One member of staff ran every client payroll. When they were ill, RTI submissions were at risk on every payday that week.
- The practice knew this was a risk and had not been able to hire cover economically.
What we found
- No documented process — the knowledge existed only in one person's head.
- Client-specific quirks (salary sacrifice arrangements, varied pay dates) were undocumented.
- No checklist for the RTI submission itself, which is the piece with a hard deadline on every payday.
What we did
- Documented each client's payroll specifics and built a standard run checklist.
- Added a trained second pair of hands working inside the practice's own payroll software.
- Introduced a pre-submission review step covering the RTI file specifically.
The outcome
- Payroll no longer depends on one person's availability, and there have been no late RTI submissions since.
- Documenting the process surfaced three clients whose arrangements had been handled inconsistently for years.
Start with a conversation
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