Sage Payroll

One login, one bill, books and payroll talking to each other. Copilot flagged an apprentice moving NI category the month he turned 21, would never have caught that myself.

If you leave Sage Accounting the payroll pricing standalone is different, worth understanding the bundle before committing. No other complaints.

Goals and one to ones in the same system as pay. E signature on contracts saved a DocuSign subscription. Self service holiday booking with the shared calendar.

360 feedback setup is rigid, you work Sage’s way. Support chat quality varies noticeably by time of day.

Everything in one place, pay, pensions, payslips, holiday. Statutory sick pay calculated correctly first time when one of our nurses was off for six weeks, which I used to dread working out by hand.

Wish the mobile app let me approve a pay run, currently I need the laptop. Minor thing.

The anomaly checking before each pay run. Holiday balances the girls can check themselves instead of asking me. Support answered on a Sunday when I was doing payroll late, which I did not expect.

Shift scheduling is only on Premium and we sit on Standard, so rotas still live on a whiteboard. The upgrade gap between £23 and £34 feels wide for one feature we want.

Shift scheduling with templates for our standard patterns. Clock in and out from carers phones. Hours to pay without manual transfer. Sage Copilot flags when someone worked well over their usual hours.

Scheduling interface is functional rather than slick, drag and drop can be fiddly on a tablet. Occasional lag on Monday mornings when everyone submits time at once.

Migration tooling and the support person who checked our first run. Pension contributions to two different providers handled. Associates on variable sessions paid correctly each month.

The one month free trial is Standard plan only, we wanted to trial Premium features and could not without paying. Small thing given how it went.

Scales up and down with the season without plan changes. Bulk operations for the seasonal intake. Leavers processed cleanly with P45s the same day.

Costs jump in the busy season with per head pricing, predictable but worth modelling. Rehiring last year’s seasonal staff requires re-entering some details that it could remember.

The four step pay run is genuinely idiot proof, and I mean that kindly because I had never run payroll before. Tax and NI just calculate. The RTI submission happens as part of the run so you cannot forget it. Payslips go to the lads on their phones.

The reports come out of Excel looking scruffy and need tidying before the accountant sees them. That is my only real gripe in two years.

Payroll to accounts sync with no manual journals. Confidential payroll access kept separate from the bookkeeping users. Salary sacrifice handled correctly for our cycle to work scheme.

Custom reporting is limited, I export and pivot for the partners quarterly pack. A report builder would round it out.

Auto enrolment assessment correct for part timers crossing the threshold some months and not others, which was exactly what the bureau kept fumbling. Trustees like that I can produce the staff cost report myself.

The price is per plan not per charity size, a nonprofit discount would help small charities. Otherwise genuinely struggling to fault it.