Sage Payroll

Pay run takes me ten minutes on the last Friday of the month, done from the van more than once. The lads get payslips on their phones. HMRC side is completely handled.

Seasonal workers coming and going means adding and removing employees, and beyond the included five it charges per head. Fair enough, but budget for it if your headcount swings.

Never once had an RTI submission fail or go missing in three years, which I cannot say for every product I have used. Auto enrolment assessments are right every time. The price per company is sensible for bureau style use.

Switching between client companies takes more clicks than it should. A proper bureau dashboard across all clients would save me real time.

Hard to make an uncorrectable mistake, and corrections when needed are clean with a proper trail. New starter and leaver processing is well guided. Consistent between clients so my process notes work everywhere.

Price rises have arrived most years, modest each time but the direction is the same. Grandfathered pricing for long standing customers would be a nice gesture.

Weekly pay runs are quick once your staff are set up. Holiday pay for the Saturday staff calculated properly. The accountant logs in herself at year end which saves us both time.

Weekly payroll means you are in it every week obviously, and the odd slow afternoon on the site is more noticeable. Nothing that has made me want to go back to the ledger.

Directors NI calculated on the annual basis correctly, which simpler tools get wrong. Reliable RTI. Support competent on the one occasion needed.

Interface busy with features we will never use. Would happily pay less for a directors only mode with half the screens.

Starters and leavers are quick. Support sorted a duplicated employee record inside one phone call. The pay run reminds you about outstanding tax code notices before you run.

Tronc and tips distribution is manual, a hospitality feature set would be welcome. Rota features need Premium which we have not stretched to.

April tax changes just appear, no update to install, no panic. Pension files upload to Nest without editing. P60s at year end took minutes for eighteen staff.

Jumping between payroll and the HR area feels like switching apps. Had one support query about statutory paternity that took three contacts to get a straight answer.

Core calculations always correct. The self service portal cut the payslip reprint requests to zero. Onboarding checklists keep the paperwork consistent.

No rule builder for complex overtime and shift premiums, we prepare those in a spreadsheet and import. At sixty plus employees the per head charges make it worth comparing against bigger payroll platforms.

April changes handled invisibly. A tax code change for one of the engineers arrived from HMRC into the software before the paper letter reached him. Payslip portal means no reprints.

They retired a report layout I liked in an update without much notice. Found an equivalent but release notes could be clearer about what is changing.

Salary sacrifice configured properly with the right NI treatment. Year end is an afternoon, not a week. Employee portal adoption was immediate, even from the partners who resist all technology.

The dashboards on login are more marketing than information, I click past them every time. Let me set my landing page.