On 3rd September, GOV.UK published its latest naming round. Around 660 employers have been named for failing to pay the National Minimum Wage. £4 million returned to more than 27,000 workers and £7 million in penalties. Getting national minimum wage compliance right is harder than it looks, even for employers with no intention of underpaying.

Scroll the list and you’ll find household names on it. Organisations with finance directors, payroll teams and HR functions. It’s unlikely any of them decided to underpay thousands of people.

So we asked Sarah Sharpe, Founder of Payroll Ninjas, a community of UK payroll practitioners (and the host of our National Payroll Week panel on 11th September) to help us get to the bottom of where it keeps going wrong for businesses that are trying to get it right.

What’s the question your community asks most about National Minimum Wage?

“Salary sacrifice, without a doubt. And the other big one is when you can and can’t deduct during absence — sickness, maternity. Those two come up over and over,” Sarah explains. 

“What makes it hard isn’t that the rules don’t exist. It’s that there’s a lot of conflicting advice out there, and most businesses don’t have anyone in-house who can settle it. So people ask the community, because where else are they going to go?”

They look for reassurance from their peers, the pressure is real!

The story is the same all over. Salary sacrifice is a complex topic and rarely operates as a single scheme. Pension is the obvious one, but employers are also running holiday purchases, nursery fees, electric vehicles, shares and medical cash plans through sacrifice arrangements. Each one reduces pay. Each one has to be accounted for before you know what someone’s real hourly rate is.

Why are businesses still getting National Minimum Wage payments wrong?

Sarah says:

“Business as usual, mostly. There are deadlines, there’s the actual job to get done, and payroll has its own deadline every single month. The checks do happen — they just don’t happen as thoroughly as they need to.”

Even though payrollers highlight the risk of not meeting NMW compliance some businesses will have the attitude “We will deal with it when someone complains” That is what some will face.

Some employers say they go through every single staff member by hand. Others check a month in arrears to see whether anyone slipped under. With some describing it as a headache they come back to a couple of times a month.

And when it goes wrong, the business doesn’t always catch it first. At a recent event, one employer told us they’d fallen short in the past and only found out when an apprentice pointed it out.  

“And most business don’t have the luxury of a dedicated minimum wage person,” Sarah continues. “There’s rarely anyone whose actual job is this one area. It sits with someone who’s already doing pensions, maternity, statutory sick pay and everything else that arrives with a deadline attached. You might have a payroll team of two people running payroll for fifteen hundred… All that, and the advice out there can often be conflicting.”

Are payroll problems actually getting worse?

“I don’t think the problem is growing, I think awareness is. It’s always been happening — the checks are just shining a spotlight on it now. Social media, HMRC, all of it.”

Enforcement is also being reorganised. The Fair Work Agency was established in April 2026 under the Employment Rights Act 2025. It brings four previously separate bodies under one roof: HMRC’s National Minimum Wage team, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate and the Office of the Director of Labour Market Enforcement.

So the substance hasn’t changed. The visibility has, and the government has committed to publishing naming lists more regularly. (If you want the current rates and obligations in one place, our National Living Wage 2026 employer compliance check covers what changed in April.)

“But there is a real resourcing issue underneath it,” describes Sarah. “Your role grows and you grow with it. What changes underneath you is the legal responsibility, and that means the whole business needs to change, not just the payroll team. I think businesses genuinely underestimate what it takes to stay on top of this.”

Five national minimum wage mistakes behind most compliance failures

Pulling the threads together, five things account for most accidental underpayment.

Routine deductions that push pay below minimum wage. A weekly deduction for a holiday-purchase scheme is fine most weeks. Then someone’s hours drop or they take a week off, and the same deduction takes them below the floor—so it can’t be taken, and the recovery schedule has to change by hand. Uniforms, tools, till shortfalls and parking all behave the same way.

Salary sacrifice. The sacrifice reduces pay for minimum wage purposes, so the calculation runs on what’s left rather than the contractual salary. There’s a live risk here for anyone moving to employee self-service: if people can change their own pension contributions, something has to stop the change that would take them under.

Birthdays. The bands change at 18 and 21, so the correct rate changes on a date no payroll calendar knows about. From April 2026 the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, against £10.85 for 18 to 20-year-olds—a gap of £1.86. Miss a 21st birthday and the underpayment builds every week until someone notices, and the employee has no reason to know their rate should have gone up.

Derived rates. Holiday pay and overtime rates calculated from a compliant base rate can still land below the floor. Nothing flags it. Worth knowing that holiday pay record-keeping requirements have applied since April 2026, even though Fair Work Agency enforcement of holiday pay isn’t expected until 2027—so the records matter now, not later.

Unpaid working time. Cashing up, handovers, security checks, travel between sites, mandatory training. This is also where records bite — one employer pointed out that in an audit they’d need evidence when a specific person took a specific break, not just what they were paid.

Five checks before your next pay run

Each of the five failure points above is checkable. None of them takes long on its own. 

1. List anyone paid at or close to the floor for their age band. That’s your exposure list.
2. Total every deduction and re-run the hourly rate on what’s left—including the weeks where hours dip.
3. Check every sacrifice participant against the reduced pay figure, not the headline salary.
4. Pull a list of everyone with a birthday coming up who’s approaching 18 or 21. If nothing generates that list automatically, that’s your gap.
5. Check your derived rates — holiday and overtime — not just base pay.

If you only do one, do the first. It tells you the size of the problem before you spend time on the rest.

Minister for the Future of Work Kate Dearden says: “Every employer should check their payroll now and reach out to Acas if they need further support.”

The longer-term answer is the resourcing point Sarah made: This can’t depend on one person remembering. Where hours, pay, ages and approvals sit in the same place, the checks run every cycle rather than when someone has a spare afternoon. That’s also what an audit trail looks like when somebody asks you to produce two years of it.

How Employment Hero helps

Employment Hero offers payroll at different levels, from free payroll and comprehensive features via add-ons through to a fully managed service—so what’s included depends on the plan. What follows is what the platform does; check out the pricing page to see exactly what’s included at what level. 

The reason any of this matters for National Minimum Wage is that most of what goes wrong depends on someone remembering to check. Making the checks part of the process to begin with is a major fix.

Compliance built into the pay run

Payroll includes National Minimum Wage checks alongside PAYE and NI calculations, holiday pay calculations and statutory payments. The system is kept up to date with legislation changes including National Minimum Wage and National Insurance rates, so you’re calculating against current rates without anyone updating them by hand.

Warnings before the money moves

Configure the process once and automations run it — you review and approve. You get a heads-up if something’s missing, with warning triggers and contingency pauses so nothing slips through.

Deductions and sacrifice in one place

Salary sacrifice schemes, pension contributions, attachment of earnings orders and statutory payments including SSP and SMP are all handled alongside pay. Calculating them in the same place is what makes the rate that’s actually left visible.

Pensions without manual assessment

PensionSync handles automatic enrolment, contributions, and opt-in and opt-out from one source of truth, updated in real time. Contributions enter the pay run as a percentage of pensionable earnings, with National Insurance rebate amounts specified where they apply.

Where the hours come from

Rotas & Time and Attendance covers time clocks, timesheets and geofencing. Relevant here because unpaid working time only becomes visible if it’s captured somewhere.

Unusual scenarios, set up once

Payroll scenarios can be configured per employee, including overtime rates, bank holidays and allowances. Derived rates are where compliant base pay stops being compliant.

Records that hold up

RTI submissions go to HMRC automatically after a pay run, along with FPS, EPS, P11, P11D, P32 and P60s. The platform is HMRC-recognised, RTI-compliant and GDPR-compliant.

Sarah’s view:

“I’ve reviewed Employment Hero free payroll software for small UK businesses… I highly recommend it as one of the strongest free payroll tools on the market. If you’re still working on payroll manually, you should check Employment Hero out.”

Bring your messiest scenario

Sarah is hosting our National Payroll Week panel on Friday 11 September at 9.30am, joined by Jeni Morris, who spent years investigating minimum wage cases at HMRC, Nicola Denison from Phase 3 on how the risk changes across a client book, and Phil Harbage, an implementation expert from Employment Hero.

Free, 45 minutes including a live Q&A. Register now and join us live or receive the recording after the event.   

Disclaimer: The information in this article is current as at 4th September 2026, and has been prepared by Employment Hero Pty Ltd (ABN 11 160 047 709) and its affiliates (Employment Hero). The views expressed here are general information only, provided in good faith to assist employers and employees, and should not replace professional advice. Some information comes from third-party data believed accurate but not independently verified. No warranties ensure it is complete, accurate, current, or fit for its intended use. Employment Hero disclaims responsibility for inaccuracies and any loss or damage from reliance on this information. You should research and seek professional advice before making decisions or relying on this article.

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

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• Seven in ten (71%) employees with two to five years’ experience say a shrinking pay gap makes it hard to feel motivated to train new hires despite a third being expected to do exactly that
• Experienced junior staff and new starters are separated by just £650 a year in salary with nearly half (46%) of HR leaders expecting it to narrow further 
• 84% of HR leaders fear losing staff as a result, yet only one in five organisations plan to adjust pay to address the problem 
• Nearly a quarter (23%) of HR leaders use tech solutions unable to compare pay changes to employee responsibilities, hindering visibility into pay compression 

London, UK, 4th September, 2026 – Young professionals are becoming reluctant to train new hires as rising entry-level pay narrows the gap between new starters and employees with more experience, new research from HR software and services specialist IRIS Software Group reveals*. 

Seven in 10 (71%) young professionals – employees with two to five years’ experience* – told IRIS they find it difficult to feel motivated to train or help a new starter earning almost as much as them.  

The same study panelled the views of 500 HR leaders*, with a third (32%) admitting that the gap between young professionals and entry level recruits has narrowed over the last two years. Of those, HR professionals blamed pay compression on factors including rises to the national minimum and living wages, and prioritising attractive starter salaries over pay rises for existing staff.  

IRIS’ study suggested little sign that pay compression would ease, with almost half (46%) of HR leaders polled expecting salary bands to narrow further over the next two years. 

In instances where young professionals have discovered what a new starter earns, a quarter (24%) said it was the same as their salary, 38% said it was up to £1,000 less, and only 16% said it was between £1,000 and £3,000 less. Around one in six (16%) said they’d discovered new starters were being paid more than they were.  

Across the study, the average pay gap between young professionals and entry-level staff stood at just £650 a year. Among young professionals who learnt what new starters were earning, 69% said it left them feeling undervalued, frustrated or disappointed. Some were motivated to take action, with around one in six (16%) accepting a new job offer, and a third (33%) asking for a pay rise. 

The issue is worrying 84% of HR bosses, who are concerned about losing young professionals that feel their pay does not reflect their additional responsibilities and experience when compared to new recruits. However, only one in five (20%) HR leaders told IRIS they plan to make targeted salary adjustments. 

Stephanie Coward, Managing Director for HCM at IRIS, said: “It’s not surprising to see frustration building when young professionals are taking on harder work, more responsibility and helping train the next intake, but see almost no difference in their pay. 

“Businesses have faced genuine pressure to raise starting salaries, including increases to the National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage. But this isn’t only being driven by forces outside employers’ control. HR professionals also pointed to internal issues such as salary bands not being reviewed regularly enough.” 

Compounding the problem, almost a quarter (23%) of HR leaders said their current HR systems are not capable of comparing pay against changes in employees’ skills and responsibilities – making it harder to identify where pay compression is emerging and which employees are most affected. 

Stephanie continued: “Most businesses won’t be able to solve this with blanket pay rises. But they do need to understand where compression is happening and where it risks costing them good people. 

“A targeted salary increase may look expensive, but so is losing an experienced employee, recruiting their replacement and rebuilding the knowledge that walks out of the door with them.” 

IRIS advised that the first challenge is seeing the problem clearly, saying if employers can’t track how pay is moving alongside skills, experience and responsibility, they risk discovering pay compression only when someone asks for a rise or hands in their notice. 

Stephanie concluded: “Better visibility gives businesses the chance to intervene earlier – whether that means targeted pay adjustments, clearer progression or simply having a more informed conversation with employees about what their experience is worth. The businesses that get ahead of this aren’t the ones reacting to resignations – they’re the ones treating pay data as a strategic tool, not just a payroll function, so they can see where the ladder is breaking down before their best people do.” 

ENDS 

*The research was conducted by Censuswide on behalf of IRIS Software Group, among a sample of 511 UK senior HR professionals and 500 UK employees who have been in full-time work for between two and five years. The data was collected between 30.07.2026 – 05.08.2026.  

About IRIS Software Group 

IRIS Software Group provides intelligent software for accounting, HR, payroll and education. Supporting organisations where the work has to work, IRIS helps customers run essential, compliance-grade systems with confidence. Trusted by over 800,000 organisations across 135 countries, IRIS brings nearly 50 years of innovation and deep domain expertise together with data and AI to help customers work smarter, spot what matters, reduce risk and move forward with confidence to grow. 

For people and payroll teams, IRIS helps organisations support employees from hire to retire, pay people compliantly, accurately and on time, and build stronger businesses. Its software and flexible services connect HR, payroll, recruitment, talent and workforce information, helping teams reduce risk, improve employee experience and turn workforce data into clearer insight for better business decisions. 

To see how IRIS helps organisations get things right first time, every time, visit www.iris.co.uk or follow IRIS Software Group on LinkedIn. 

Media contact: 

Jennifer Peters | News@irisglobal.com  

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

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For finance teams in schools and trusts, procurement can be one of the most time-consuming parts of the working week. Orders are placed on a supplier’s website, then re-keyed into the finance system, then checked against budgets and approvals – often across multiple sites, with multiple suppliers, and multiple versions of the same process.

E-procurement through IRIS Financials, powered by punchout technology, removes this duplication. And with our growing network of supplier partners, more of your everyday purchasing can now be brought into a single, streamlined process.

Several of the newest additions to that network came directly from you. At our recent roadshow events, schools and trusts told us exactly which suppliers they wanted to see added next – and we listened: every single supplier requested is now part of the network. Here’s what’s already live and what’s coming next.

What is e-procurement, and how does punchout work?

E-procurement simply means buying goods and services electronically – your finance system talks directly to your supplier’s system, instead of you typing the same information twice. Punchout is the technology that connects the two.

Here’s how it works: from within IRIS Financials, you ‘punch out’ to your chosen supplier’s online catalogue, browsing live prices, stock levels, and products exactly as you would on their website. Add items to your basket and confirm, and the order flows straight back into IRIS Financials as a ready-made purchase order – with no need to retype information or switch between systems, and no risk of pricing or product code errors.

Your usual approval and authorisation processes stay exactly the same. Punchout doesn’t bypass your controls – it removes the admin sitting in front of them.

Why e-procurement matters for school and trust finance teams

In a multi-academy trust, the scale of this challenge multiplies: more sites mean more orders, more suppliers, and more opportunities for inconsistency. Common challenges include:

• Hours spent re-keying orders from supplier websites into your finance system
• Pricing errors that cause orders to be queried, delayed, or rejected
• Disjointed systems that don’t talk to each other, leaving finance teams stuck in the middle
• Inconsistent purchasing processes across sites, making trust-wide oversight a challenge

E-procurement addresses all of these directly. Purchase orders are generated automatically from the supplier’s live catalogue, so the information is accurate from the start. Everything runs inside IRIS Financials, so your audit trail, budget codes, and approval chain stay intact – and the process stays consistent across every site.

Kieren Shepherd, Estates Manager at Cygnus Academies Trust, describes the difference it has made to his team:

“The IRIS punchout system has drastically reduced the required time in our purchasing processes. The system’s ability to automatically enter correct product codes, details and costs has significantly streamlined the process for our staff but also, more importantly, dramatically reduced the total number of errors due to human error. It makes those larger orders (the dreaded summer holiday ones!) an absolute breeze as the purchase orders are automatically filled out, and the order sent to the supplier once the purchase order has gone through our approval processes. All in all, the IRIS punchout system is a game changer.”

– Kieren Shepherd, Estates Manager, Cygnus Academies Trust

Your purchases, your suppliers – all in one place

The suppliers below are likely to include some of the names your school or trust already buys from most often – which means the time savings apply to your highest-volume, most frequent purchases from day one. IRIS Financials’ e-procurement network already connects you to three major names in education purchasing.

Amazon Business

Amazon Business punchout brings the full Amazon catalogue – stationery, IT equipment, classroom resources, SEN supplies, cleaning and catering products, and more – directly into IRIS Financials. For many schools, Amazon accounts for a large share of weekly orders in many schools, so the time saving from this integration alone is considerable. Watch the Amazon Business demo video to see it set up in IRIS Financials.

ESPO

ESPO is a leading public sector buying organisation, offering Department for Education-approved frameworks and a catalogue of over 28,000 products spanning stationery, classroom consumables, catering, cleaning, and facilities. The ESPO punchout integration brings all of this straight into your IRIS Financials purchasing workflow. See the step-by-step ESPO set-up guide for a full walkthrough.

KCS Education

KCS Education was the first dedicated education supplier to offer punchout with IRIS Financials. With a catalogue built specifically for schools – covering stationery, classroom essentials, art and craft supplies, and furniture – KCS punchout connects your existing KCS account directly to your finance system.

New partners joining the network

These four suppliers are now live – each one added to the network because schools and trusts asked for them directly at our roadshow events.

We already work with 12,000+ smarter schools across the UK, so we understand the budget codes, approval chains, and policies you rely on day to day. Each new supplier connection is built around that understanding, so it fits straight into your existing ways of working – keeping integration and implementation as straightforward as possible.

HBS

HBS is a family-owned education supplies specialist with over 50 years of experience supporting 3,000+ schools, colleges, nurseries, and trusts with more than 20,000 products.

Their punchout integration is now live in IRIS Financials, and they’ve created a step-by-step setup guide and video to help schools get started quickly.

Herts FullStop

With over 60 years of experience and a catalogue of more than 18,500 products, Herts FullStop is a trusted procurement partner for schools and trusts nationwide. Their punchout integration is now live in IRIS Financials – giving even more of your purchasing a direct route through e-procurement.

Findel

Findel has been supporting educators for generations, ensuring you get the right resources first time and on time, so that nothing gets in the way of creating great learning outcomes. Findel has a wide range of Made for Education resources including specialist SEND, Science, PE ranges, and more. With Punchout you can continue to shop the entire range from Findel – including GLS, Hope, and AtoZ brands with ease and efficiency.  View the easy setup guide here or contact one of the Findel team today.

YPO

Having supported schools and trusts for over 50 years, YPO has cemented themselves as one of the UK’s leading partners to educators nationwide. Their offering covers everything you could need, from classroom essentials and specialised resources to facilities supplies so your school runs smoothly. If it matters to you, then you can trust that it matters to them. YPO Punchout is now available through IRIS Financials, connecting your purchasing workflow to the YPO website to easily browse and build your basket before transferring it all back to your finance system for seamless efficiency.

Get started with e-procurement

With Amazon Business, KCS Education, ESPO, YPO, Findel, HBS, and Herts FullStop all live, many of your most-used suppliers are accessible directly within IRIS Financials. Less time re-keying orders, fewer errors, and a cleaner audit trail from the moment a basket is confirmed.

E-procurement is included as standard for every IRIS Financials customer – it isn’t a separate chargeable module, so there’s no extra purchase to make before you get started.

Speak to your Account Manager or visit the IRIS Help Hub to set up punchout for your school or trust today.

Simon Freeman

Managing Director for Education

Simon Freeman is Managing Director for Education at IRIS, where he leads the strategic evolution of the organisation’s education portfolio. He is responsible for leading the team to deliver innovative, technology‑led solutions that support schools, multi‑academy trusts and independent institutions worldwide to be more effective, and improve student outcomes.

Driven by a strong commitment to improving outcomes in education, Simon brings extensive senior leadership experience from large‑scale technology and services organisations.

Simon is focused on positioning IRIS as the partner of choice for institutions navigating increasing operational, financial and regulatory complexity.

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

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UK businesses with 50–200 employees need HR software that offers core people management functionality in addition to having the option to integrate with payroll.

At this business size, a lightweight system, or the lack of one, poses a risk, while larger, enterprise HR software is not yet worth the investment.

This guide covers what to look for, the UK compliance requirements your system must handle and how IRIS’ Staffology HR addresses each requirement.

Key takeaways:

• The 50–200 employee size is a distinct milestone for businesses, as you’ve outgrown spreadsheets and basic absence tools, but you don’t yet need enterprise-scale HR software.
• Workplace compliance becomes increasingly troublesome and difficult to manage without the right tools, with a range of legislative changes, such as the Employment Rights Act 2025, greatly impacting your business.  
• Integration between HR and payroll becomes even more important, as each new employee is another set of data to manage, leading to a greater risk of duplicate data entry and the errors that come with it.
• Buy HR software that can scale, rather than just meet the needs of today, as replacing your HR system regularly costs more time and money.

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What changes with HR when you reach 50–200 employees?

Once your business reaches 50–200 employees, HR admin begins to scale and the associated risk also increases.

Processes that worked for managing a team of 20, such as a shared holiday spreadsheet or contracts stored in a SharePoint folder, begin to crack under the pressure of a bigger business size.

Managing several teams, multiple new starters and a growing set of statutory obligations requires dedicated HR software.

However, at this stage, enterprise HR software is disproportionate to your needs, as it’s built for thousands of employees, and the costs and implementation reflect that.

Instead, a 50-200 employee business requires HR software that can easily fit into your existing workflows and has the option to scale as you grow.

Why over half of HR professionals are working extra hours

Read the blog

What HR software looks like for a 50-200 employee business

HR software for 50–200 employees should give you:

• A single location for all employee records: one place where all employee personal details, contracts, salary history, absence and documents live securely together.
• HR automation: routine HR tasks run themselves, cutting admin and the risk of things being missed.
• Connected payroll: the option to integrate HR and payroll ensures employee data flows between systems without you having to manually re-key information.
• Employee and manager self-service: everyday requests, such as requesting holidays, can be handled directly by employees and managers without going through HR.
• Workforce reporting: information on key HR areas, such as absences, headcount and turnover, is available directly within the system.
• Audit trail: the system keeps a record of who changed what and when, which you can easily produce on request.
• Security: role-based access controls, data encryption and defined retention rules ensure your sensitive data is protected and compliant with UK GDPR.

Every manual HR process is a time-consuming, single point of failure.

At this size of business, you typically don’t have a large HR team, meaning the tools you deploy need to work with you, not against you.

What do UK businesses with 50–200 employees need from their HR software?

At this headcount, there are ten criteria that matter most, which you can use as part of your evaluation framework.

Why integration matters

Disconnected systems, endless data entry and constant firefighting leave HR professionals overworked, frustrated and stretched too thin. 

The systems that truly reduce workload are those in which HR and payroll share a single source of truth.

By integrating your HR software with payroll, you can create a seamless and secure data flow.

Connected systems reduce duplication and remove the need for manual data entry as the changes in your HR software automatically flow to your payroll system.  

For example, when HR and payroll are connected, a maternity record in HR becomes maternity pay in payroll, or an approved overtime claim flows through to the pay run without anyone re-keying it.

No HR and payroll integration? You’re missing the full picture

Read the blog

Why self-service is the highest-value feature at this size

In businesses with 50–200 employees, HR teams are typically only a few people, if not a single person.

As such, if every payslip query, address change and holiday request routes through them, the team spends all its time on admin, rather than more strategic work like hiring, retention or manager support.

Self-service moves these admin-based tasks to your employees and managers, enabling them to handle their requests directly.

Data is also more accurate because employees are entering their own information directly.

What UK compliance requirements must your HR software cover?

UK employment law is always changing, but right now is an exceptionally active period.

Your HR software must keep pace with this change.

Buy software that updates for legislation automatically, because at 50–200 employees, your capacity is limited.  

Here are a few key areas of note when thinking about compliance.

Employee data

HR holds the most sensitive data in the business, from bank details and home addresses to health information and disciplinary files. 

You can’t risk this data getting into the wrong hands. 

What’s more, the UK is governed by strict data protection policies, such as UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act and the newer Data (Use and Access) Act. 

The rules are strict, and you can’t afford mistakes. 

When assessing vendors, ask where the data is hosted, who can access it and what security certifications they hold (ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials are the two UK buyers most commonly ask for).

Employment Rights Act

The Employment Rights Act has created major disruption in UK compliance, using a phased approach which means businesses have to keep up with regular change. 

For example, the recent April 2026 changes have already introduced day-one rights to paternity leave and Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) from the first day of sickness, as well as launching a new Fair Work Agency (FWA). 

More changes are coming, including unfair dismissal protection changing to six months’ service, in addition to restrictions on fire-and-rehire practices. 

The common thread? Your HR policies and processes all have to adapt to the changing legislation.  

For small businesses without a large HR function, it’s a lot of moving parts to manage. 

Day-to-day HR processes

Your day-to-day people processes are often where employment law bites.  

Every part of the employee lifecycle carries duties, from establishing a Right to Work during recruitment to managing employee leave requests. 

Getting these areas wrong not only damages the employee experience, but exposes you to costly tribunal claims. 

However, doing things ‘correctly’ is only one part of the puzzle. 

Should employee disputes arise, you must be able to show that the correct process was followed; HR processes that live in spreadsheets and inboxes notoriously cause issues, especially if taken to an employment tribunal. 

Payroll compliance

Done well, payroll builds trust, but on the flip side, mistakes in payroll can damage the employee experience and incur massive penalties. 

However, there’s so much to manage, from ensuring pay is correct and on time to handling Real Time Information (RTI) submissions. 

Not to mention that each April, rates and thresholds also change, and from April 2027, we’re seeing a phased approach to the payrolling of benefits in kind (BiK). 

If you’re struggling with payroll, you’re not alone. 

The Global Payroll Association found that a quarter of UK PAYE employees have had an incorrect payslip, and of those, 78% were underpaid. 

This section is a summary of current UK requirements, not legal advice. Every effort has been made to ensure the content is accurate at the time of writing, but details are subject to change. If you require legal advice, please consult a qualified professional.

How IRIS Staffology HR addresses these requirements

Here’s how our HR software, Staffology HR, can help support compliance.

How do you move from your current HR setup?

If you’re looking to replace your current setup, we can help.

Here are the most common starting points for businesses with 50-200 employees, and what the process of moving your HR setup entails.

Moving from spreadsheets, shared drives and inboxes

Perhaps the most common scenario at this size, and often the most rewarding.

While your employee data exists, it’s scattered across spreadsheets, folders and inboxes.

For those in this position, when moving to new HR software, expect to spend the bulk of your effort on confirming data quality rather than data transfer.

This typically involves confirming employee records, start dates and holiday balances, as well as deciding which historic records need to be moved across.

Contracts and right-to-work evidence need to be the priority, as these documents are essential if a dispute arises.

Moving from a basic HR tool

When a basic system is in place, your focus will be on exporting what you can; however, expect data models to differ.

While basic tools handle leave relatively well, they rarely hold:

• Contract history
• Salary progression
• Absence reasons

As such, some of this information will need rebuilding rather than importing.

While on the surface this may seem daunting, we encourage you to treat it as an opportunity.

Use this migration to standardise job titles, departments, cost centres and manager hierarchies before they’re locked into a system you’ll use for years.

Moving from an HR system that no longer fits

If your headcount has increased, there’s a good chance you’ve outgrown your current HR system.

Perhaps there’s no audit trail, reporting isn’t able to answer questions or workflows don’t fit current processes.

The good news is that migrating between systems is usually more straightforward as data is already structured.

Instead, the work sits in reconfiguration, mapping your current policies, approval routes and entitlement rules, rather than replicating what the old system forced you to do.

What Staffology HR implementation looks like

With Staffology HR, we aim to make the process quick and simple.

A dedicated project coordinator and team of consultants manage the whole implementation process from start to finish.

Every project is built around your business, but as a guide, it looks a little like this:

1) Introduction

A project coordinator is allocated to your business and becomes your first point of contact.

2) Provisioning

You’ll be sent a short document to complete, giving us what we need to set up your system.

3) System build

Your consultant uses that information to build your system.

4) Data import

If selected as part of your package, we import your existing data into the new system.

5) Training

Detailed training on the system is run by your consultant for you and your team.

6) Go-live

Staffology HR is up and running.

7) Account manager

You’re assigned a named account manager as your point of contact.

8) Ongoing support

You receive access to the Customer Community portal, user guides and technical support.

What should you ask before choosing HR software?

Vendor answers get much more useful when the question is direct and specific.

Take these eight questions into every HR software demo:

1. Can you show me the audit trail?
2. How does the system handle contract variation?
3. What does an employee’s first two weeks in the system look like?
4. How do you store right-to-work evidence and prompt on expiry?
5. Where is employee data held, who can access it and what security certifications do you hold?
6. Can a manager see only their own team?
7. When legislation changes, how quickly is the software updated?
8. What happens when we pass 200 employees?

Why do UK businesses choose Staffology HR?

• Always compliant: Staffology HR keeps your business up to date with changing workplace regulations, ensuring compliance and reducing risk.
• Security credentials: Staffology HR features ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials for information security, plus ISO 9001 for quality management.
• Cost-effective and scalable: with transparent per-user pricing and flexible plans, Staffology HR grows with your business, offering a cost-effective solution for companies of all sizes.
• System integration: seamlessly connect Staffology HR with other crucial business systems, like Staffology Payroll and IRIS Recruitment, to streamline processes and improve data accuracy across your business.
• Simplify everyday tasks: Staffology HR automates routine HR processes like absence tracking, holiday management and onboarding workflows, saving you hours of admin work.
• Real-time insights and reporting: turn data into actionable insights with access to dashboards, reports and analytics, helping your team make informed decisions without delay.

What customers say about Staffology HR

“For us, we needed a system that was user-friendly, able to grow with the business and had the right price point. As a small business, an HR system is a big investment, so it needs to be right. We’re really pleased with the efficiencies we’ve made in the first year with Staffology and having all our data visible in one place has had such a positive impact on the business.”

Ford Fuels

“The previous HR officer, along with my manager, who’s more of a finance person, really pushed for Staffology HR to be implemented and moved away from the previous system. With the previous system, it was only being used for some things, with other information being recorded on spreadsheets or paper. Staffology HR offered better reporting and just gave us better visibility over our HR by bringing it all into one place.”

Oak Tree Mobility

 Summary

• At 50–200 employees, HR admin increases and becomes prone to added risk. The right software helps alleviate this with automation, self-service and good record keeping.
• Compliance is creating massive pressure right now, with the Employment Rights Act landing in phases through 2026 and 2027.
• Doing things ‘correctly’ isn’t enough. Processes that live in spreadsheets and inboxes are hard to defend at a tribunal.
• HR software features that save the most time at this size are self-service and integrated HR and payroll.
• Find software that scales, as replacing an HR system twice is far more expensive than choosing one that meets current and future needs.

See how Staffology HR works for a team of your size

Book a Staffology HR demo and one of our HR specialists will walk through the setup that fits a business with 50–200 employees.

Alternatively, start a free trial and see Staffology HR for yourself.

Visit the Staffology HR page here.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Stephanie Coward

Managing Director, HCM

Stephanie Coward is Managing Director for HCM at IRIS, where she leads the strategy, innovation and growth of the organisation’s HR and payroll portfolio. She is responsible for positioning IRIS as a trusted partner to HR professionals and ensuring its solutions support the evolving needs of modern workforces.

With more than 25 years’ experience in the technology sector, Stephanie brings deep commercial and operational expertise, with a passion for improving the employee experience through technology.

Stephanie is committed to advancing IRIS’ HCM offering and helping organisations build more resilient, empowered workforces.

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

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Download Anime Batch

UK payroll and workforce compliance is the set of employer obligations covering PAYE, National Insurance Contributions, RTI reporting, statutory forms, workplace pensions and auto enrolment, holiday pay, statutory leave, and workforce record keeping. For payroll managers, HR directors, and bureau operators, compliance failure can lead to HMRC penalties, pension enforcement by The Pensions Regulator, Fair Work Agency inspection, Employment Tribunal claims, reputational damage, and avoidable payroll errors that affect employee trust and business continuity. 

2026/27 represents the most significant single year shift in employer compliance obligations in recent years. The Employment Rights Act 2025 has introduced new duties from April 2026. The Fair Work Agency is now operational with proactive inspection powers. The maximum protective award for failure to consult on collective redundancies has doubled. Further reforms, including a reduced unfair dismissal qualifying period, are confirmed for January 2027. Managing this landscape requires more than awareness of what has changed: it requires payroll and HR systems that can apply the changes accurately, maintain the audit trails that enforcement bodies now expect, and support the operational consistency that prevents errors from becoming liabilities. 

This guide is written for payroll managers, HR directors, finance teams, and payroll bureau operators responsible for employer compliance across payroll, pensions, leave, and workforce record keeping. It introduces each compliance topic, explains the current obligations and risks, and links to the IRIS spoke guides where each topic is covered in depth. 

Sources: HMRC employer guidance; The Pensions Regulator; GOV.UK employment law guidance; Employment Rights Act 2025; Pension Schemes Act 2026; ACAS 

What this guide covers 

• Why payroll and workforce compliance is more complex in 2026/27 
• Core payroll and HMRC compliance: PAYE, RTI, NIC, statutory forms, statutory pay 
• Workplace pensions and auto enrolment 
• HR compliance and employment law touchpoints: holiday pay, redundancy, records 
• Integrated payroll and HR technology 
• 2026/27 compliance calendar 
• Frequently asked questions 

Why Payroll & Workforce Compliance Is More Complex in 2026/27 

Every tax year brings rate changes, threshold updates, and incremental legislative amendments. 2026/27 is different in scale. The Employment Rights Act 2025 came into force with several immediate provisions from 6 April 2026: statutory sick pay payable from day one of absence, paternity leave as a day one right, and a new mandatory holiday records duty under Section 35 of the Act. These are not administrative adjustments; they require active changes to payroll configuration, HR policy, and record keeping systems before the affected pay runs. 

The Fair Work Agency, operational from 7 April 2026, has changed the enforcement landscape materially. Its proactive inspection powers mean that compliance inadequacies can be identified without a worker complaint. Employers who cannot demonstrate compliance through adequate records, not just through internally consistent calculations, are now at greater risk than at any point in the preceding decade of the equivalent enforcement model. 

The Pension Schemes Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026 and sets the agenda for pension reform over the coming years. Among its provisions is a framework for the automatic consolidation of small dormant defined contribution pots, those worth £1,000 or less that have received no contributions for at least twelve months, into authorised consolidator schemes overseen by The Pensions Regulator or the Financial Conduct Authority. Most of these provisions depend on secondary legislation: regulations are expected from 2027 onwards, with the duty to consolidate not anticipated to take effect until around 2030. The immediate action for HR and payroll teams is to monitor developments and review whether their current pension provider arrangements remain appropriate as the market consolidates, rather than to change anything before the first 2026/27 pay run. 

Collective redundancy exposure has also increased. From 6 April 2026, the maximum protective award a tribunal can make for failure to consult on collective redundancies has doubled from 90 days to 180 days of gross pay per affected employee, under Section 30 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 amending the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. The Act also provides for the collective consultation threshold to be widened so that redundancies across more than one establishment can be aggregated, with the precise threshold to be set by secondary legislation. 

Looking ahead to January 2027, the unfair dismissal qualifying period reduces from two years to six months. The Government has confirmed this change and the 1 January 2027 commencement date, and has stated it will not consult further. From that date, any employee with at least six months of continuous service will be able to bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim, and the statutory cap on the compensatory award is removed. Anyone who starts employment from 1 July 2026 will reach the six month threshold by the commencement date. HR teams should review their onboarding, probation, performance management, and capability procedures now. The lead time is shorter than it appears. 

Compliance is not a payroll only problem. Holiday pay calculations depend on HR systems holding accurate pay history. Redundancy calculations require HR records showing continuous service and correct start dates. Pension assessments require payroll earnings data. When systems are disconnected, errors in one area propagate to the other. A single source of truth for employee data is not a nice to have in a 2026/27 compliance environment; it is a prerequisite for audit readiness. 

Core Payroll & HMRC Compliance 

PAYE, RTI, and National Insurance 

PAYE is the mechanism through which employers withhold income tax and National Insurance Contributions from employees’ earnings and remit them to HMRC. The accuracy of PAYE depends on the quality of the payroll run: correct tax codes, correct NIC category letters, correct earnings figures, and correct application of current year rates and thresholds. Errors that persist across pay periods compound into year end liabilities that require correction through the payroll and potentially trigger HMRC compliance interest. 

Real Time Information (RTI) requires employers to submit a Full Payment Submission (FPS) on or before the date employees are paid. Where an FPS is submitted late, HMRC may issue an automatic late filing penalty. The Employer Payment Summary (EPS) is submitted where the employer has nothing to pay or wishes to claim statutory payment rebates. Both submissions must reconcile with the underlying payroll records; a discrepancy between what is submitted via RTI and what is held in the payroll system is a compliance risk that surfaces at year end reconciliation. 

National Insurance Contributions for 2026/27 carry a 15% employer rate on earnings above the Secondary Threshold of £5,000 per year, following the changes introduced from April 2025. NIC category letters must be correctly applied to each employee: errors in category assignment, particularly for employees approaching age 21, apprentices under 25, and qualifying veterans, produce systematic over or underpayment that may require correction through amended FPS submissions and employer payment summary adjustments. 

National Insurance Contributions: Employer Obligations & Rate Changes for 2026/27 — for the full 2026/27 rate table, category letter guide, directors’ NIC rules, Employment Allowance, and Class 1A/1B obligations

Statutory forms and year end reporting 

Statutory payroll forms are mandatory, deadline driven compliance outputs that depend on the accuracy of payroll records throughout the year. A P45 must be issued without unreasonable delay when an employee leaves, with Part 1 submitted to HMRC via the FPS. P60s must be issued to all current employees by 31 May 2026. P11D and P11D(b) returns for benefits in kind must be submitted by 6 July 2026, with Class 1A NIC payable by 22 July. 

Payrolling of benefits in kind is available on a voluntary basis for 2025/26 and 2026/27, reducing or eliminating the individual P11D forms for payrolled benefits while the P11D(b) obligation for Class 1A NIC remains. From 6 April 2027, payrolling of benefits becomes mandatory. Payroll teams should be reviewing their benefits in kind arrangements and software capability now rather than waiting for the mandatory deadline. 

Year end reporting accuracy depends on the quality of payroll data maintained throughout the year. P11D errors arising from incorrect benefit valuations, P60 inaccuracies arising from incorrect year to date figures, and P45 issues arising from late or incorrect termination processing are all correctable, but each correction consumes time and creates risk if it results in an employee receiving incorrect tax information on a mortgage application or self assessment return. 

Understanding P45, P60 & P11D: A Payroll Manager’s Reference Guide — for the full deadlines, form requirements, payrolling of benefits, GDPR compliant distribution, and the risks of manual paper based processes

Statutory pay and payroll accuracy 

Statutory Sick Pay has been payable from the first qualifying day of absence since 6 April 2026, following the abolition of the three day waiting period under the Employment Rights Act 2025. Payroll systems that still apply the old waiting day logic are generating incorrect SSP payments from the first sickness absence processed after 5 April 2026. This must be corrected before the next affected pay run. 

Statutory Maternity Pay, Statutory Paternity Pay, Statutory Adoption Pay, and Shared Parental Pay are calculated based on the employee’s average weekly earnings in the qualifying period. Errors in average earnings calculations, arising from incorrect or incomplete pay history in the payroll system, produce incorrect benefit amounts that may need to be corrected through amended RTI submissions and, where underpayments are identified, supplementary payments to the employee. 

Small employers who qualify for the 103% SMP recovery rate must ensure their payroll system is configured to apply the correct recovery percentage. The wrong recovery rate applied consistently across a year generates an incorrect employer payment summary and an accumulated discrepancy in the PAYE account that will require resolution. 

Workplace Pensions and Auto Enrolment 

Auto enrolment is a continuous compliance obligation, not a one time setup. Every pay period, employers must assess each worker against the three statutory categories, eligible jobholder, non eligible jobholder, and entitled worker, and take the appropriate action for each. A payroll system that assesses workers correctly at setup but does not update as earnings change, as workers approach age 22, or as new starters join will accumulate missed enrolments that require retroactive correction. 

Contributions must be calculated on qualifying earnings, applied using the correct basis, and deposited to the pension scheme promptly. Minimum employer contributions for 2026/27 remain at 3% of qualifying earnings, with 5% from the employee, totalling the 8% statutory minimum. These thresholds are subject to annual uprating; payroll teams should verify that the qualifying earnings band figures are confirmed for 2026/27 before the first April pay run. 

Re enrolment takes place every three years and requires the employer to identify all eligible jobholders who have previously opted out, re enrol them, issue the required communications, and submit a Declaration of Compliance to The Pensions Regulator within five months of the re enrolment date. Missing the Declaration of Compliance is a separate regulatory breach from missing the re enrolment itself; both attract TPR enforcement action. 

The Pension Schemes Act 2026 is shaping the future of the workplace pension market. Its small pots provisions will, once the supporting regulations are in force, see dormant defined contribution pots of £1,000 or less automatically consolidated into authorised consolidator schemes, and the Act introduces scale and value for money requirements for schemes used for auto enrolment. These are forward looking measures with implementation deferred to later in the decade; current auto enrolment duties are unchanged for 2026/27. Payroll and HR teams should monitor developments and consider whether their existing pension provider arrangements remain appropriate as the market evolves. 

The Pensions Regulator’s enforcement model operates through a tiered penalty system: fixed penalty notices of £400 for non compliance with statutory notices, escalating daily fines of up to £10,000 per day for persistent failure, and civil penalties for wilful or repeated breaches. The Fair Work Agency’s proactive inspection powers complement TPR enforcement; both bodies can investigate employer compliance without a worker complaint. 

UK Employer’s Guide to Pension Auto Enrolment & Workplace Pensions — for the complete guide to worker assessment, contribution calculations, postponement, re enrolment, TPR penalties, and automating compliance with Staffology Payroll

HR Compliance and Employment Law Touch points 

Holiday entitlement and leave calculations 

The Working Time Regulations 1998 (as amended) entitle most workers to 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave per year. For workers on regular fixed patterns, the calculation is straightforward: days worked per week multiplied by 5.6. For irregular hours and part year workers, leave accrues at 12.07% of hours worked in each pay period under the rules effective from 1 April 2024. This calculation requires accurate hours data at the pay period level; payroll systems that do not capture actual hours worked for variable hours staff cannot apply the correct accrual. 

Holiday pay must reflect normal remuneration, not just basic pay. For workers who regularly receive overtime, commission, or allowances, those elements must be included in the holiday pay calculation using the 52 week reference period. Systematic underpayment, paying only basic rate on holiday leave for workers whose normal remuneration is higher, creates a continuing series of unlawful deductions that can be pursued at an Employment Tribunal covering up to two years of deductions. 

From 6 April 2026, Section 35 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 requires every employer to maintain adequate records of holiday entitlement, accrual, and payment for each employee for six years. Failure to comply is a criminal offence. The Fair Work Agency has proactive powers to inspect these records without a worker complaint. Employers whose leave records are held in spreadsheets or email threads, rather than in a system that produces a timestamped, exportable audit trail, are at risk of criminal liability under the new duty. 

UK Holiday Entitlement & Leave Calculations: The Definitive Employer Guide — for the 12.07% accrual method, 52 week reference period, rolled up holiday pay, carry over rules, Regulation 16B records duty, and the Fair Work Agency’s enforcement powers

Redundancy and workforce change 

Statutory redundancy pay is calculated using an age banded formula multiplied by years of service, subject to a weekly pay cap that is uprated annually. The calculation must be performed year by year, applying the correct age band multiplier to each year of service counted backwards from the dismissal date. The most common calculation error is applying a flat multiplier rather than the year by year age band method, producing systematic underpayments for employees whose service spans multiple age bands. 

Collective redundancy consultation obligations apply where 20 or more dismissals are proposed within 90 days at one establishment. The minimum consultation period is 30 days for 20 to 99 redundancies and 45 days for 100 or more. The HR1 form must be submitted to the Insolvency Service at or before the start of collective consultation; failure to notify is a criminal offence. From 6 April 2026, failure to consult with appropriate employee representatives can result in a protective award of up to 180 days of gross pay per affected employee, doubled from the previous maximum of 90 days under the Employment Rights Act 2025. The Act also provides for the consultation trigger to extend across more than one establishment, with the threshold to be confirmed in secondary legislation, so employers running multi site reductions should treat aggregated headcount as a live risk. 

The unfair dismissal qualifying period reduces from two years to six months on 1 January 2027, a date the Government has confirmed. From that date, employees gain protection from ordinary unfair dismissal once they have six months of continuous service, and the statutory cap on the compensatory award is removed. Employers must be able to demonstrate a fair and documented dismissal process from much earlier in the employment relationship than before. Onboarding, probation, performance management, and capability procedures should be reviewed now, before the change takes effect. 

Redundancy Pay & Entitlements: What UK Employers Need to Know — for the redundancy calculation formula, the age band worked example, consultation obligations, protective award risk, and the importance of accurate HR records in a tribunal defence

Records, audit trails, and data retention 

Compliance is evidenced by records, not by policy. An employer who has correctly calculated SSP but cannot produce the records showing how each payment was calculated does not satisfy the evidential standard that the Fair Work Agency, The Pensions Regulator, and Employment Tribunals now require. Record keeping is not an optional operational extra; it is the difference between a compliance assessment and a finding of non compliance. 

The following records must be retained for the periods specified: 

• PAYE and payroll records: generally six years from the end of the tax year to which they relate
• Pension and auto enrolment records: six years from the date of the record; opt out notices for four years 
• Holiday entitlement and pay records (from 6 April 2026): six years, under Regulation 16B of the Working Time Regulations as amended by the Employment Rights Act 2025; failure to comply is a criminal offence 
• SSP records: three years from the date of payment 
• Statutory family pay records (SMP, SPP, SAP, ShPP, SPBP): three years from the end of the tax year to which they relate 
• Employment contracts and HR records: generally six years following the end of employment 

Records that technically exist but are inaccessible, unstructured, or held across multiple disconnected systems cannot be produced efficiently in response to a Fair Work Agency inspection or an Employment Tribunal disclosure request. The practical standard is records that can be exported, organised by employee, and provided within a reasonable timeframe without requiring manual reconstruction. 

The Solution: Integrated Payroll and HR Technology 

Disconnected systems, spreadsheets, and manual re keying are the root cause of most avoidable payroll and HR compliance failures. When payroll data and HR data are held in separate systems without a shared data layer, errors in one become invisible to the other: a start date corrected in the HR system may not propagate to the payroll system; a pay rate change processed in payroll may not update the HR record; an absence recorded by a line manager may not reach the payroll team before the pay run closes. Each gap is a potential compliance failure. 

The consolidation of payroll and HR data into integrated, cloud based platforms removes these friction points. NIC category changes are applied automatically when an employee reaches a threshold age. Holiday accrual is calculated from actual payroll data, not from a separate manual tracker. Pension assessment uses live earnings from the pay run. Records are maintained in one system with a single audit trail, available for export without manual reconstruction. 

Staffology Payroll 

Staffology Payroll is a cloud based payroll engine supporting RTI submissions, PAYE and NIC calculations, statutory pay processing, and pension assessment through a single platform. Tax year updates, including NIC threshold changes, SSP rate updates, and statutory pay rate changes, are applied automatically, reducing the risk of running April payroll on prior year settings. 

RTI submissions are generated within the payroll workflow, with FPS and EPS produced and submitted directly to HMRC. Year end form generation, P60s, P11D data extraction, and P45 issuance, is built into the platform. For employers transitioning to payrolling of benefits in kind ahead of the mandatory April 2027 deadline, Staffology Payroll supports the real time payrolling calculation and the P11D(b) Class 1A NIC declaration that remains required even where individual P11D forms are no longer needed. 

Staffology HR and IRIS Cascade HRi 

Staffology HR is a cloud based HR platform for SMEs that provides connected employee records, leave management, and joiner mover leaver workflow support. IRIS Cascade HRi serves mid market organisations requiring stronger workforce data control, complex absence management, and richer reporting. Both feed into the payroll data layer that Staffology Payroll uses for RTI, NIC assessment, and holiday pay calculations, removing the version control and data gap risks that arise from separate systems. 

For holiday compliance specifically, both platforms maintain the leave records required under the Regulation 16B mandatory records duty: timestamped accrual calculations, leave taken, carry over events, and holiday pay computations. Records are retained for the required six years and are exportable for Fair Work Agency inspections or Employment Tribunal disclosure requests. 

IRIS Payroll Services 

For organisations that want to remove the operational risk of in house payroll processing, IRIS Payroll Services provides a fully managed payroll bureau service delivered by CIPP accredited payroll professionals. The service covers RTI submissions, PAYE and NIC processing, statutory pay calculations, year end form production, and ongoing compliance management. IRIS holds CIPP Gold accreditation. 

Managing complex payroll in house requires not just the right software but the right expertise, available consistently, updated for every legislative change. For businesses where payroll resilience is a concern, whether due to staffing, capacity, or the complexity of variable hours and statutory pay scenarios, managed payroll transfers the execution risk rather than simply reducing it. 

Ensure your business pays employees accurately and stays compliant across payroll, pensions, and HR. Explore IRIS HCM solutions for UK employers. 

2026/27 Payroll & HR Compliance Calendar 

The following calendar covers the key recurring dates and milestones payroll professionals and HR teams should track across the 2026/27 tax year. It is designed as a reference and planning tool, not an exhaustive list of every obligation. 

Note: Monthly FPS and EPS submission dates, pension contribution deadlines, and RTI obligations recur throughout the year. The dates above cover the annual and one off milestones most relevant to payroll planning. 

UK Payroll & Workforce Compliance: Frequently Asked Questions 

What are the penalties for late PAYE submissions? 

HMRC operates an automatic late filing penalty regime for RTI. Where the Full Payment Submission is submitted after the employee payday, an automated late filing notice may be issued. For most employers, the first late submission in a tax year attracts no penalty under HMRC’s current approach, but persistent late filing generates penalty notices based on the number of employees in the PAYE scheme. Penalties range from £100 per month for employers with one to nine employees, increasing to £400 per month for employers with 250 or more employees. Where PAYE and NIC payments are made late, interest and late payment penalties apply separately from the RTI filing penalty. Employers with a history of compliant filing may be eligible for penalty mitigation on application to HMRC. 

How often do employers need to re enrol staff into a workplace pension? 

Employers must carry out re enrolment every three years, within a three month window centred on the third anniversary of their staging date or previous re enrolment date. Re enrolment applies to eligible jobholders who opted out of the pension scheme more than twelve months before the re enrolment date. Workers who opted out within the twelve months immediately preceding the re enrolment date are not required to be re enrolled at this cycle. 

Following re enrolment, the employer must submit a Declaration of Compliance to The Pensions Regulator within five months of the re enrolment date. Failure to submit the declaration is a separate regulatory breach from failure to carry out re enrolment, and both can attract TPR enforcement action. Re enrolment is one of the most commonly missed auto enrolment obligations, particularly where employer records do not track individual opt out dates across the full workforce history. 

What records should employers keep for holiday pay and leave compliance? 

From 6 April 2026, employers must keep adequate records under Regulation 16B of the Working Time Regulations 1998 (as inserted by Section 35 of the Employment Rights Act 2025). Records must cover holiday entitlement under regulations 13(1) and 13A(1), accrual calculations under regulation 15B(2), payment records under regulation 16(1), leaver calculations under regulations 14(2) and 14(6), and carry over under regulation 15E(2). These records must be retained for six years from the date they are made. Failure to maintain adequate records is a criminal offence. The Fair Work Agency has proactive inspection powers to request and review these records without a worker complaint. 

How do irregular hours holiday pay calculations work? 

For irregular hours and part year workers, statutory leave accrues at 12.07% of hours worked in each pay period. This rate is derived from 5.6 weeks divided by 46.4 weeks (52 minus 5.6). The accrual applies to leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024. The 12.07% rate governs how much leave is accrued; it does not determine what the worker is paid when they take leave. Holiday pay must still reflect the worker’s normal remuneration, calculated using the 52 week reference period where pay is variable. Rolled up holiday pay, adding 12.07% to each pay period payment in lieu of separate holiday pay, is permitted only for irregular hours and part year workers under the current rules. 

What is changing for collective redundancy in 2026/27? 

From 6 April 2026, the maximum protective award an Employment Tribunal can make where an employer fails to consult on a collective redundancy has doubled from 90 days to 180 days of gross pay per affected employee, under the Employment Rights Act 2025. The collective consultation triggers themselves are unchanged for now: 20 or more proposed dismissals at one establishment within 90 days, with a minimum 30 day consultation period for 20 to 99 redundancies and 45 days for 100 or more, and an HR1 form filed with the Insolvency Service before consultation begins. 

The Act also provides for the consultation threshold to extend beyond a single establishment in future, so that redundancies proposed across multiple sites can be aggregated when assessing whether the duty is triggered. The precise threshold will be set by secondary legislation. Employers planning reductions across more than one location should treat combined headcount as a live consideration and take legal advice before commencing any exercise. 

When does the unfair dismissal qualifying period change, and to what? 

The qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal reduces from two years to six months on 1 January 2027. The Government has confirmed both the change and the commencement date and has said it will not consult further. From that date, an employee with at least six months of continuous service can bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim, and the statutory cap on the compensatory award is removed. Because the change applies to anyone in employment on the commencement date, any employee who starts work from 1 July 2026 will have reached the six month threshold by 1 January 2027. Day one protections against discrimination and automatically unfair dismissal are unaffected. Employers should review probation, onboarding, performance management, and capability procedures well ahead of the deadline. 

Can payroll be outsourced if the business has complex shift patterns? 

Yes. Outsourced payroll bureaux, including IRIS Payroll Services, regularly manage payrolls involving complex shift patterns, variable hours, multiple rate structures, and irregular earnings. The key requirement is that the payroll data provided to the bureau is accurate and complete: shift patterns, hours worked, pay rates, absence records, and any applicable allowances must be submitted in the agreed format before each payroll run. 

The employer retains legal responsibility for payroll compliance regardless of whether processing is outsourced. An outsourced provider calculates and submits based on the information provided; they do not take on liability for errors arising from incorrect or incomplete input data. IRIS Payroll Services is delivered by CIPP accredited professionals and covers RTI, statutory pay, year end forms, and ongoing compliance administration. 

Does Staffology support RTI submissions to HMRC? 

Yes. Staffology Payroll generates and submits Full Payment Submissions and Employer Payment Summaries directly to HMRC as part of the standard payroll processing workflow. FPS submissions are made on or before the employee payday, in line with the RTI requirement. The platform handles the connection to the HMRC Government Gateway and retains a record of each submission, including the submission date and any HMRC acknowledgement received. For employers managing their own payroll, this removes the manual filing step and produces an audit trail of RTI compliance without requiring separate logging. 

Stephanie Coward

Managing Director, HCM

Stephanie Coward is Managing Director for HCM at IRIS, where she leads the strategy, innovation and growth of the organisation’s HR and payroll portfolio. She is responsible for positioning IRIS as a trusted partner to HR professionals and ensuring its solutions support the evolving needs of modern workforces.

With more than 25 years’ experience in the technology sector, Stephanie brings deep commercial and operational expertise, with a passion for improving the employee experience through technology.

Stephanie is committed to advancing IRIS’ HCM offering and helping organisations build more resilient, empowered workforces.

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

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Advising clients on Capital Gains Tax (CGT) involves helping them understand the tax implications of disposing of assets, calculating their potential liability, and utilising available reliefs to ensure they pay the correct amount of tax. For accountants, this requires a robust process for tracking asset disposals and accurate software for complex calculations and reporting. 

CGT is not a compliance task you can afford to get wrong. The penalty for incorrect advice is a professional indemnity claim. The penalty for missing the 60-day property reporting window is automatic and immediate. And with rates, reliefs, and the Annual Exempt Amount all having changed materially since 2024, the margin for error on a manually-maintained spreadsheet is narrower than it has ever been. 

Part of a series: This article is a supporting resource within our main pillar: The Definitive Guide to UK Accountancy Practice Compliance (2026/27). For CGT obligations that affect limited companies, see also UK Corporation Tax Filing: A Practice Guide. 

What Are the Capital Gains Tax Rates for the 2026/27 Tax Year? 

⚠️ Important note for practitioners: The CGT rate structure changed fundamentally in the Autumn Budget of October 2024. Rates that many advisors still carry in their mental model — 10%/20% for most assets, 18%/28% for residential property — no longer apply. The correct 2026/27 rates are shown below. 

Since 30 October 2024, CGT rates on virtually all asset classes have been unified. Residential property no longer carries a premium rate over shares or other assets. The current position for the 2026/27 tax year is: 

Whether a client pays 18% or 24% depends on whether their taxable gain — when added to their taxable income — falls within or above the basic rate band (£50,270 for 2025/26). Gains straddling the threshold are taxed at both rates. This calculation has to be done individually for every disposal, for every client. 

The Annual Exempt Amount stands at £3,000 for 2026/27 — frozen until at least 2030. It was £12,300 as recently as 2022/23. That reduction alone has significantly expanded the number of clients with a reportable and taxable CGT position. 

Business Asset Disposal Relief: the direction of travel matters 

BADR has increased in cost every year for the past two years: 10% in 2024/25, 14% in 2025/26, and now 18% from 6 April 2026. The lifetime limit remains £1 million, but with the standard higher rate at 24%, the relief now saves only 6 percentage points — down from 14 percentage points two years ago. 

The maximum BADR saving in 2026/27 is £60,000 per person. That is still worth planning around, but the window of opportunity to advise clients on exit timing may be narrowing. Any client considering a business sale should be having that conversation now, with realistic expectations about what BADR can deliver. 

A Practitioner’s Guide to Key CGT Reliefs 

Understanding which reliefs apply — and whether the conditions are met — is where advisory value is created and where errors are made. The reliefs below are not mutually exclusive and often need to be considered together. 

Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR) 

BADR reduces the CGT rate to 18% on qualifying business disposals, up to a lifetime limit of £1 million. 

For a company shareholder, the qualifying conditions that must be met throughout the 2-year period ending on the disposal date are: 

• Employee or officer of the company for at least 2 years
• Held at least 5% of ordinary share capital and voting rights for at least 2 years 
• Entitled to at least 5% of distributable profits and assets on a winding up 

For sole traders and partners, the business must have been trading for at least 2 years and the disposal must be of the whole or part of that business. 

The 5% share requirement is the most common disqualifying factor. Dilution events — including new share issues ahead of a sale — can inadvertently break the conditions. This is a planning point that should be raised with any client who holds company shares and anticipates a liquidity event. 

Private Residence Relief (PRR) 

PRR exempts gains on the disposal of a client’s only or main home for the period it was occupied as their principal residence. 

Where the property was the main home throughout the entire period of ownership, the gain is fully exempt. Where the client has lived there for only part of the ownership period, the gain is time-apportioned: the proportion relating to actual residence (plus the final 9 months of ownership, which are always deemed residence) is exempt. 

Periods of absence that qualify as deemed residence include: 

• Up to 3 years for any reason 
• Any period working abroad in any employment
• Up to 4 years where an employer requires the client to work away from home 

Where a client has more than one home, they can elect which is their main residence for PRR purposes — but the election must be made within 2 years of acquiring the second property. Missed elections are a common and expensive oversight. 

Other Reliefs to Consider 

Gift Hold-Over Relief applies where an asset is gifted rather than sold. Normally, a gift triggers CGT on the difference between market value and cost. Hold-Over allows the gain to be deferred — the donor pays no CGT, but the recipient takes on a lower cost base. The gain is effectively transferred, not eliminated. The interaction with IHT must always be assessed before this route is recommended. 

Business Asset Rollover Relief allows a business owner to defer CGT on the disposal of a qualifying asset (typically land, buildings, or fixed plant used in the trade) if the proceeds are reinvested in a new qualifying asset. The reinvestment window is 12 months before to 36 months after the disposal. Partial reinvestment creates partial deferral. This is particularly relevant for clients restructuring business premises or machinery. 

The CGT Reporting Workflow: From Calculation to Submission 

The administrative complexity of CGT advice has increased substantially since 2020. There are now two distinct reporting routes, different deadlines, and an annual reconciliation requirement that catches many practices out. 

Real-Time CGT Reporting for UK Property 

Any disposal of UK residential property where a taxable gain arises must be reported — and the CGT paid — within 60 days of completion. This has been the rule since 27 October 2021. 

The report is submitted via HMRC’s online UK Property Account. It is separate from Self Assessment. A client who is registered for Self Assessment must complete both the 60-day return and the SA return. The 60-day return is not a draft — it is a payment on account against which the final liability is reconciled through SA. 

Where PRR covers the entire gain, no 60-day return is required. Where it covers only part of the gain, the return is still required. 

Penalties for missing the 60-day window are automatic: 

• Day 1 late: £100 
• 6 months late: £300 or 5% of tax (whichever is higher)
• 12 months late: a further £300 or 5% of tax 

These penalties apply even where no additional tax is due. For a client selling a buy-to-let, receiving the completion statement and then putting the paperwork to one side for “the January return” is a common and costly mistake — and one that falls to the practice when the client assumed their accountant would handle it. 

Reporting Other Gains via Self Assessment 

Gains from shares, business assets, and other non-property disposals are reported on the SA108 Capital Gains Summary supplementary pages of the annual Self Assessment return, with a filing and payment deadline of 31 January following the end of the tax year. 

The complexity here lies in the calculation, not the filing. A client who has disposed of shares across multiple transactions over a tax year requires a proper Section 104 pool calculation — tracking weighted average cost across all acquisitions, applying the bed-and-breakfast matching rules for same-day and 30-day repurchases, and splitting the gains correctly if they straddle the basic and higher rate bands. 

A gain of £50,000 on a share portfolio, for a client with £38,000 of taxable income, is not simply 18% or 24%. It is 18% on the first £12,270 (the headroom to the basic rate band) and 24% on the remaining £37,730. Getting that wrong in a spreadsheet is easy. The error is invisible until HMRC queries it. 

The Real Cost of Manual CGT Calculation 

The CGT advisory workflow has two distinct failure modes. Both are expensive. 

The first is a calculation error. CGT spans multiple asset classes, multiple rate bands, and multiple reliefs — often applied simultaneously on the same disposal. A single formula error in a spreadsheet can misapply a relief, use the wrong rate, or omit an allowable cost. The client gets an incorrect tax bill. If they overpay, they may never know. If they underpay, the exposure falls on the practice when HMRC investigates. 

The second is a process failure. Missing the 60-day property deadline. Failing to spot that BADR conditions are not met before the disposal completes. Not identifying that a client’s share sale triggers matching rules that increase the gain. Not reconciling the 60-day payment with the SA liability. These are not obscure edge cases — they are regular occurrences in practices that rely on manual processes and calendar reminders. 

The professional indemnity exposure from CGT advice errors is real. HMRC’s reduced Annual Exempt Amount means more clients have reportable gains. The unified rate structure means fewer obvious shortcuts. And with BADR now at 18%, exit planning conversations with business-owning clients carry more weight — and more responsibility — than before. 

The Solution: How IRIS Personal Tax Ensures Accurate CGT Reporting 

This is where a technology investment in professional tax software earns its return. 

IRIS Personal Tax automates CGT calculation across all asset classes — shares, property, business assets, and mixed portfolios — applying the correct rates, reliefs, and matching rules without requiring the preparer to manually build and maintain those calculation structures. 

Within the IRIS Personal Tax CGT computation module, the workflow for each client looks like this: 

• Asset disposals are entered once, with full cost base information — acquisition cost, enhancement expenditure, allowable disposal costs 
• The system automatically applies the correct Section 104 pool logic for share disposals, including same-day and 30-day matching rules 
• PRR calculations are handled by inputting the ownership and occupation periods — the exempt fraction and chargeable gain are computed automatically 
• BADR eligibility is flagged with reference to qualifying conditions, with the relief applied at the correct rate for the relevant tax year 
• The Annual Exempt Amount and current year losses are applied in the most beneficial order 
• The resulting liability is split correctly across the basic and higher rate bands based on the client’s income position 

For residential property disposals, IRIS Personal Tax populates the 60-day UK Property Return directly from the same calculation, eliminating the need to re-enter data into HMRC’s online portal separately. The estimated CGT figure used for the 60-day payment and the final SA figure are linked — so any adjustment at SA stage automatically flags the discrepancy for review. 

For practices operating within the IRIS Accountancy Suite, the CGT data within Personal Tax sits alongside the client’s income tax position, pension contributions, and other SA workings. The rate band calculation that determines whether a gain is taxed at 18% or 24% — or both — is done automatically, using the client’s total taxable income as the base. There is no separate spreadsheet. There is no manual check. 

The practice benefit is not just accuracy. It is speed, consistency, and the ability to provide advisory output — modelling the CGT impact of different disposal timings, asset sequencing, or spouse-transfer strategies — within the same tool used for compliance. 

CGT Advisory: Frequently Asked Questions 

What assets are exempt from Capital Gains Tax? 

The main CGT exemptions are: your client’s only or main home (subject to PRR), assets held within an ISA or pension, UK government gilts, personal use motor vehicles, cash, prizes and gambling winnings, and assets transferred between spouses or civil partners (which are treated as no gain/no loss transfers). Personal chattels with a value below £6,000 are also exempt, with marginal relief applying for values between £6,000 and £15,000. 

How do you calculate the cost basis of an asset? 

The cost basis is the original acquisition price plus all allowable costs — solicitor and surveyor fees on purchase, SDLT (stamp duty), and any enhancement expenditure (capital improvements, not repairs or maintenance). For shares, the Section 104 pooling rules apply: shares of the same class in the same company are pooled, and the cost basis is the weighted average of all acquisitions. Disposal proceeds are matched against this average cost. The same-day rule and the 30-day bed-and-breakfast rule take priority over the pool for matching purposes. 

Can capital losses be carried forward? 

Yes. Capital losses that cannot be relieved against gains in the same tax year are carried forward indefinitely against future gains. Crucially, carried-forward losses are applied after the Annual Exempt Amount — they cannot be used to shelter gains that would otherwise be covered by the AEA. Losses must be formally claimed on the Self Assessment return within 4 years of the end of the tax year in which they arose. Unclaimed losses are time-barred and permanently lost. Advisors should review clients’ SA history for unclaimed losses, particularly given the AEA reduction in 2023 and 2024 which may have left losses unreported. 

Eva Mrazikova

Global Head of Product Marketing

Eva Mrazikova is Global Head of Product Marketing at IRIS, where she leads go-to-market strategy, competitive positioning and product marketing across IRIS’ Accountancy and HCM portfolios in the UK and US.

With more than 20 years’ experience spanning product marketing leadership, commercial strategy and technology transformation, Eva brings a rare blend of strategic vision and hands-on execution to complex, multi-product businesses.

A recognised product marketing leader and qualified accountant, she has spent her career at the forefront of digital transformation, helping organisations navigate the shift from legacy platforms to cloud-based, AI-enabled solutions while driving measurable commercial outcomes through market-led strategy.

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

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Sagi will accelerate IRIS’ data and AI strategy, delivering faster and smarter insights for customers worldwide

London, UK, 6th July, 2026:  IRIS Software Group (IRIS), a leading global software provider of accountancy, payroll, HR, and education solutions, today announced the appointment of Surya Sagi as its first Chief Data and AI Officer, effective immediately. The newly created role reflects IRIS’ commitment to helping customers unlock even greater value from their solutions and data, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver faster insights and better-informed decisions. It also supports the company’s next phase of product innovation and global growth. 

Sagi brings more than 30 years of experience building data and AI platforms, scaling cloud-native SaaS businesses, and leading M&A and platform integration across SMB, enterprise, and regulated environments. His track record of building and scaling platforms has helped customers achieve better outcomes while accelerating growth and strengthening governance. He most recently founded ARKA AI and ARKA Advisors, helping enterprises successfully transition from AI experimentation to governed, outcome-driven implementation. Prior to that, Sagi served as Chief Technology Officer at Pitney Bowes.  

“AI only matters if it makes a real difference to the people who rely on us. Our customers trust IRIS with the work that must work, and that’s what this is about,” said Jason Dies, CEO, IRIS Software Group. “Surya has spent his career building data and AI platforms that make that work faster, smarter, and more reliable. His technical depth and proven track record will be instrumental as we accelerate our AI ambitions and continue to turn innovation into real outcomes for customers. His appointment as our first Chief Data and AI Officer marks a defining moment in how we build and deliver for the businesses that count on us.” 

Sagi will oversee IRIS’ global enterprise data and AI strategy, including data governance and the company’s responsible AI framework. Building on IRIS’ existing AI momentum, he will focus on scaling proven capabilities, strengthening responsible practices, delivering measurable business outcomes, and unlocking the highest-impact opportunities across products, managed services transformation, growth and retention. He will also join the company’s AI Steering Committee and Business Systems Architecture Review board to help ensure a consistent and strategic approach to AI across the organization. 

“IRIS is a trusted partner for businesses worldwide, and I am honored to join the team at such a pivotal moment of growth,” said Surya Sagi, Chief Data and AI Officer, IRIS Software Group. “AI is creating unprecedented opportunities to improve productivity, strengthen decision-making, and accelerate growth. Success will depend on deploying these capabilities responsibly, governing them effectively, and focusing on measurable business outcomes. I look forward to helping IRIS customers realize that value at scale.” 

For more information and updates on IRIS’ comprehensive solutions, visit irisglobal.com.  

### 

About IRIS Software Group   

Founded in 1978, IRIS Software Group is a global provider of mission-critical, cloud-hosted software solutions and services to more than 100,000 customers across 135 countries. IRIS is a trusted partner to businesses, finance, HR and payroll teams, educational organisations, and accountancy firms of all sizes, providing innovative operational solutions that streamline complex processes, maintain compliance, and unlock growth. Through simplifying, automating and providing insights on everyday mission-critical tasks for organisations of all shapes and sizes, IRIS ensures customers can look forward with certainty and confidence. IRIS is certified as a 2024 Great Place to Work® in the UK, Ireland, India, Romania, Canada and the USA.  

Follow IRIS on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. More information on its award-winning software solutions can be found here.      

Media contact 

Jenny Peters | news@irisglobal.com 

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

Jasa Backlink

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“Growth-ready” means different things to different accountancy firms – so does everyone need to adopt a different approach?

Thankfully, no.

There is a common three-step setup for success. The strongest practices use this as their launchpad, whatever their accountancy firm growth strategy.

You need to pull three levers for reliable financial take-off: tech, resource and price.

The three levers behind a good accountancy firm growth strategy: tech, resource and price.

Let’s look at each of the three major levers and how they power an accountancy firm. Pull one and you’ll see improvement; pull all three and you can see major growth.

Lever #1: A modern, fully synced accountancy firm tech stack

The better your accountancy firm tech stack, the better you can run your practice and make decisions about resource and price. On the client-facing side, it keeps those you help in the loop and makes it easy to share data.

Prospects also get a good understanding of who you are and what makes your firm special thanks to your online presence.

But tech needs to be thought out properly; it’s a long-term investment into a firm-wide solution. It’s easy to assume that reaching for the newest, shiniest software equates to a good tech stack. However, that can mean a lot of disjointed parts failing to build up to a greater whole. Efficiency is lost, data is blocked, work disappears through the cracks, client issues pass by unnoticed and attrition goes undetected.

Growth-ready firms have a holistic view of their digital system

They think about how they can build a consolidated accountancy firm tech stack. This means true integration, where one piece of software built for one task sends data to another. The result is much cleaner (and often automated) workflows and data that stay consistent. This setup means staff can log into their software and, using one dashboard, see the status of tasks and the data underpinning it.

To build that connected ecosystem, you want mainstream, tried and tested products.

But why, when startup software can present a tantalisingly cheap offer? Because longstanding vendors are often more mature. They have developed stable software to cater for decades of legal changes and increasing client sophistication.

What you need to get in place to have great tech

A growth-ready stack is a set of functions sharing one client record, so data entered once shows up everywhere it’s needed. This can include software solutions for:

• Tax and accounts production. In a good setup, these work from a single client record, so data entry syncs across the firm. Figures aren’t rekeyed or left out
• Practice management. This solution takes into account client data, jobs, deadlines, time, WIP, and billing – and tracks the status of all work
• Client data sharing (“portals”) and automated client communication
• A web presence that ensures prospects, Google, and AI such as ChatGPT take you seriously

An accountancy firm tech stack is your first lever for a reason: it gives you data so you can take advantage of the other two. For example, it shows chargeability and where capacity sits, so a hire is an evidenced decision. And it also surfaces margin, recovery, and profitability by service line, client, and partner, so you can raise prices effectively.

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Lever #2: The power to see and control resource

Resource intelligence is about knowing who does what, how well, and at what cost. It means having a view of:

• Roles, responsibilities and how work gets executed
• Single points of failure – the risks if a key person leaves suddenly
• Chargeability and utilisation, so you know who’s stretched and who has headroom
• Hiring options, whether that’s local or hybrid, generalist or specialist, in-house or outsourced
• Capacity for lucrative service lines like advisory services

Resource management data switches your firm from instincts to insights. “I think we’re busy” becomes “this service line is at 90% utilisation”.

This gives you space to be strategic. Knowing you either have the right people – or are on the path to accessing them – unlocks a trove of options. For example, you can choose whether to hire locally, create hybrid arrangements, find gifted generalists or seek out best-in-class specialists. You will know when to keep work in-house and when to outsource.

A scenario where resource intelligence makes all the difference

Let’s imagine that audits are your biggest fee-winner at your firm. They bring in a lot of money and clients pay on time.

You decide to grow your audit book. However, to do that, your resource intel suggests you must hire an audit manager, and that they are worth £70k or more. You can’t find another expert locally, even though your firm has always been based in the office.

So, you have a decision to make: do you leave things as they are or do you make the investment, change your culture to hybrid to attract the next hire, and enjoy the rewards it brings?

Thankfully, because you know who does what, how much their time is worth, and that the right people are on the right tasks, you make an informed choice. You decide to hire, knowing that you’re not rolling the dice financially.

Lever #3: The ability to put up price

Putting prices up is the most commercial move you can make. Whether it’s wise depends on if you can justify the increase.

If you’re a quality-focused firm, do this carefully. You take pride in your work, but clients have very subjective views. They’re not accountants, so your stellar care might just seem acceptable to them – especially if you’re their first firm.

So, how can you raise prices without ruffling feathers?

By having your tech and resource levers in place, you can make an informed change. You can increase prices where needed because you know your margins and recovery rate. You can also give clients justification based on the measured value you have given them.

What an accountancy firm “strategy” without levers looks like

What happens when you don’t have the three growth-ready levers in place?

Organic growth makes you subject to outside forces

About 39% of firms actively look to attract new clients (Source: Moneypenny). Much of that will be referrals, but underneath that sits a foundational weakness if you don’t have the three levers in place.

It’s not that referrals are a bad idea; referred clients pay good money. But relying on them is relying on word of mouth. Right now, that brings a degree of risk.

Geographic areas decline. Industries that looked healthy one year start to struggle the next. In other words, those referral networks are not quite as robust as they once were.

AI is also changing how your referrals act – we know people are becoming more and more likely to use it and do some digging. If you have a weak digital presence, it doesn’t take much for an AI search to surface any mixed reviews or drop you onto a shortlist with comparable firms. Every inefficiency, mistake, or missed service people wanted to vent about is suddenly pulled to the surface.

And if your digital presence is weak, good luck appearing in any general searches, whether that’s via AI or Google’s front page.

Paying the price for not knowing your numbers

Meanwhile, if your price lever isn’t set and you’re charging people without knowing your margins or recovery rate, you could either look overpriced against rivals or win the work and lose money on it. If your resource lever is weak, you can’t meet the demand that growth creates, so service can slip at the moment a new client is forming their first impression.

On the other hand, having the three levers means you can strategize. You can see where you would want to grow service lines and increase staff support for them. You can take your destiny into your own hands and steer the firm in the direction you want it to go.

Inorganic growth means red flags and a drop in value

Accountancy firm M&A has been on the rise and if you aren’t considering it now, you will when your firm is larger.

In recent ICAEW figures, 80% of firms with 11-249 principals have made at least one acquisition; 67% expect to make further acquisitions within three years. About 25% of mid-tier firms are now PE-backed, and the UK accounts for over 40% of all PE-backed accountancy deals in Europe (Source: Accountancy Europe).

If you pull all three growth levers, you are highly desirable from an M&A perspective. On the other hand, if your systems don’t integrate and you struggle to control resource or cater for talent (such as through hybrid working) this will put other parties off.

Meanwhile, owner-dependence – whether the firm could run without its principal – can swing the final sale price by as much as 20–30% (Source: Bains Watts).

Your first step

I understand if your first instinct is to rush at tech as that all-important first lever. You want to get going with your accountancy firm growth strategy

However, there’s some groundwork to be done first.

You need to consider how to standardise your firm. You need to develop rules for how a firm operates, from business development and client onboarding to sign-offs and invoicing.

It’s time to get everyone working from the same board.

How do you do this?

We recommend running an internal project. Make sure you give it the time it deserves; there’s much to be done.

You want to see everything your firm does, how it does it, what’s best practice and where blockers exist. The project must also identify single points of failure – what would happen if one of your staff won the lottery tomorrow and handed in their notice?

I’ve done this work, and I promise you it’s not easy. At first, asking staff to explain what they do might result in a short answer. But then keep asking them. When I was being quizzed on my role, I thought I was done in a few minutes. I’d forgotten the granular detail – the VAT returns, the letters to clients, and much more. I also had to explain where and how I did it; did the job live in Excel? How joined up was one task to another in terms of data?

By the end of the exercise, the firm had a good sense of roles, responsibilities and execution. It knew what would happen if someone had to depart their role suddenly, and whether someone else could pick up the baton.

Moving to a good digital system – accountancy practice management software

When the groundwork is done, it’s time to think about a digital system. In other words, you’re ready to create that first lever.

Part of this system must manage the team properly. This accountancy practice management software has to give you:

• Visibility of margin, recovery and profitability by service line, client and partner – real-time data that powers every lever and every strategic call
• A connected, integrated stack that shares data, uniting your standardised teams and the work they do
• A single source of truth that removes single points of failure

IRIS Firm Management (IFM) was built for this purpose. It creates a data-rich foundation for your practice, turning growth efforts into evidenced, decision-making processes.

Jon Cooper

Senior Product Marketing Business Partner

Jon Cooper is Senior Product Marketing Partner at IRIS, where he works across the organisation’s accountancy portfolio, connecting software and services to the real-world needs of accountancy firms.

With 15 years’ experience in the accountancy profession, including 10 years in practice leading teams of accountants and bookkeepers, Jon brings a rare depth of first-hand industry knowledge to his role. This Practice Manager background gives him a distinctive understanding of the pressures firms face and the solutions that make a meaningful difference.

Jon is passionate about helping accountancy firms work smarter through better technology and resources, and is committed to ensuring IRIS’ solutions are positioned to meet the evolving demands of modern practice.

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

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DEI in hiring means designing recruitment so that every candidate is assessed fairly, has equal access to the opportunity, and is judged on the same consistent criteria. For UK employers, inclusive recruitment is less about statements of intent and more about how roles are written, how applicants are screened, how interviews are run, and how decisions are recorded and reviewed. 

Done well, it widens access to talent and makes hiring decisions easier to defend. Sustaining it at scale depends on two things working together: a deliberately designed process and the technology that makes that process repeatable. This guide covers both. 

The Definitive Guide to UK Payroll & Workforce Compliance 

Sources referenced: CIPD guidance on inclusive recruitment, Equality Act 2010, UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. 

Why Inclusive Recruitment Matters 

Inclusive recruitment is a quality discipline as much as an ethical one. When the process is fair and consistent, employers reach a wider pool of capable people and make better evidenced decisions about who to hire. 

The Business Case for Fairer Hiring 

Widening the candidate pool gives hiring managers more genuine choice, which tends to improve the quality of the shortlist rather than just its size. Consistent assessment also strengthens decision making: when candidates are compared against the same criteria, the reasons for each decision are clearer and easier to stand behind. 

There is a risk dimension too. A process that treats applicants consistently and records why decisions were made is far easier to defend if a hiring decision is ever questioned. 

Where Bias Enters the Process 

Bias rarely sits in a single moment. It accumulates across the hiring journey, often in small and unintended ways. 

• Role design: narrow or inflated requirements discourage capable applicants before they apply. 
• Sourcing: relying on the same channels reaches the same kinds of candidates. 
• CV screening: names, schools, and career gaps can sway judgement before skills are assessed. 
• Interviews: unstructured conversations reward rapport over relevant ability. 
• Final selection: without a record of the reasoning, gut feel fills the gap. 

Naming these points is the first step. The rest of this guide is about designing them out. 

How to Build an Inclusive Hiring Process 

Inclusive hiring is built from a series of practical choices at each stage. None of them is complicated on its own, and together they make the process measurably fairer. 

Write Job Descriptions That Widen, Rather Than Narrow, the Candidate Pool 

Job descriptions set the boundaries of the pool before anyone applies. Use gender neutral language, separate the genuinely essential criteria from the merely desirable, and avoid over-specifying qualifications or years of experience that screen out capable people for no real reason. 

Clarity and realism matter more than an exhaustive wish list. A description that states what the role actually requires invites a broader, stronger set of applicants. 

Use Anonymised Screening Where It Adds Value 

Removing names, education details, and other identifying information at the early stages can reduce the influence of unconscious bias when CVs are first reviewed. Partial or full anonymisation is a useful tool, particularly at shortlist stage. 

It is one part of a wider approach, not a complete answer. Anonymisation helps at the point it is applied, but fair sourcing, structured interviews, and reviewed decisions still do the heavier lifting. 

Standardise Interviews and Scoring 

Structured interviews ask each candidate the same core questions and assess answers against a defined scorecard. This reduces the inconsistency that creeps into unstructured conversations and keeps the focus on the requirements of the role. 

It also produces a clear record. When every interviewer scores against the same criteria, decisions are more consistent, easier to compare, and far easier to evidence if they are later reviewed. 

Make Candidate Adjustments Part of the Process 

Accessibility should be built into recruitment, not handled as an exception. Make it easy for candidates to request reasonable adjustments, and handle those requests clearly and consistently so no one is disadvantaged by the format of the process. 

This protects candidate experience as well as compliance. A process that anticipates different needs keeps strong applicants engaged who might otherwise drop out. 

How to Choose HR Software for Growing UK Businesses 

The Role of Technology in Fair Hiring 

Good intentions are hard to sustain manually. Across dozens of vacancies and many hiring managers, consistency slips unless something holds the process in place. That is where technology earns its role. 

Why Process Consistency Matters 

Manual, fragmented hiring carries a real cost: evaluation varies between managers, visibility across vacancies is limited, and proving that a process was fair becomes difficult after the fact. Each of those weaknesses introduces avoidable bias and risk. 

Consistency is the foundation that makes inclusive hiring repeatable. A defined process, applied the same way every time, is what allows fairness to scale beyond a single well run vacancy. 

How Recruitment Software Supports Inclusive Practices 

Recruitment software helps by standardising workflows so every candidate moves through the same stages, supporting collaboration so interviewers score against shared criteria, enabling anonymised screening where it adds value, and making reporting straightforward rather than a manual exercise. 

The point is not the feature list but the effect: the fair process you designed is the one that actually runs, every time, without depending on individual diligence. 

Applicant Tracking Systems: Streamlining Recruitment for UK Employers 

Tracking Diversity and Hiring Outcomes 

Measurement turns inclusive hiring from an aspiration into something you can manage. The most useful metrics show where candidates progress and where they fall away. 

• Application-to-shortlist conversion: whether a diverse pool survives the first screen. 
• Interview-to-offer conversion: whether assessment stages treat candidates consistently. 
• Offer acceptance: whether candidate experience holds up to the final stage. 
• Drop-off points: where in the funnel particular groups are lost. 

The aim is to improve process quality, not just to report headline diversity numbers. The value is in spotting where the process leaks and fixing it. 

How IRIS Supports Inclusive Recruitment 

IRIS Recruitment helps HR teams implement fairer, more consistent hiring at scale by holding the whole process in one applicant tracking system. It connects directly to the themes above: standardisation, visibility, and less manual effort.

• Less administrative friction: automation handles the repetitive steps, so attention stays on fair assessment rather than chasing tasks. 
• Consistent decision making: centralised workflows mean every vacancy runs through the same defined stages and scoring. 
• Reviewable outcomes: reporting helps HR teams examine conversion and drop-off and act on what they find. 
• Governance across hiring: a unified platform keeps records, access, and process consistent across every role. 

IRIS Recruitment | UK’s Best Applicant Tracking System

Technology supports the people who run recruitment; it does not replace their judgement. Human oversight remains essential, and the employer stays responsible for fair, lawful decisions throughout. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

What is inclusive recruitment? 

Inclusive recruitment is the practice of designing hiring so that all candidates are assessed fairly and consistently, with equal access to the opportunity and decisions based on the requirements of the role. It covers how jobs are written, how applicants are screened, how interviews are run, and how decisions are recorded. 

It is an ongoing process rather than a one-off policy. The organisations that do it well build fairness into each stage and review outcomes to keep improving. 

How does blind or anonymised screening help reduce bias? 

Anonymised screening removes identifying details such as names and education from CVs at the early stages, so reviewers focus on skills and experience rather than information that can trigger unconscious bias. It is most useful at the shortlist stage. 

It is one tool among several, not a complete solution. Fair sourcing, structured interviews, and reviewed decisions are still needed to keep the whole process inclusive. 

What recruitment metrics should HR teams track? 

The most informative metrics are application-to-shortlist conversion, interview-to-offer conversion, offer acceptance, and the points where candidates drop off. Together they show whether each stage of the process treats candidates consistently. 

These figures are most useful when used to improve the process rather than simply to report diversity numbers, because they highlight exactly where fairness or experience is breaking down. 

Can technology make hiring fairer? 

Technology supports fairer hiring by standardising workflows, enabling consistent scoring, supporting anonymised screening, and making outcomes easier to measure. That consistency is what allows inclusive practices to scale across many vacancies. 

It does not make hiring fair on its own. The process still has to be designed well, and human oversight is essential, with the employer remaining responsible for lawful, fair decisions.

Stephanie Coward

Managing Director, HCM

Stephanie Coward is Managing Director for HCM at IRIS, where she leads the strategy, innovation and growth of the organisation’s HR and payroll portfolio. She is responsible for positioning IRIS as a trusted partner to HR professionals and ensuring its solutions support the evolving needs of modern workforces.

With more than 25 years’ experience in the technology sector, Stephanie brings deep commercial and operational expertise, with a passion for improving the employee experience through technology.

Stephanie is committed to advancing IRIS’ HCM offering and helping organisations build more resilient, empowered workforces.

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

Jasa Backlink

Download Anime Batch