I’ve had a lot of conversations with business owners and finance leaders over the past few months. Different sectors, different sizes, different payroll set-ups. But the same story keeps coming up, and it’s one that frustrates me.
Payroll is drifting away from people. And the businesses relying on it are paying the price.
The software problem going under the radar
Payroll software has come a long way. Automation, integrations, real-time reporting – there’s plenty to celebrate. But look a little closer and you’ll find a lot of legacy systems that haven’t seen meaningful investment in years. They’re patched, propped up and sold on, while the people using them are left to work around the gaps.
When something does go wrong, the support on offer often makes things worse. Users raise a ticket, wait, then get a reply from someone reading a script. Ask a question about holiday pay for irregular hours, or why a student loan deduction has suddenly changed, and you’ll hear “that’s a configuration question for your payroll team”.
The client has quietly become the payroll expert. And that’s a big ask when payroll legislation shifts every year and one wrong calculation can land you with HMRC penalties or an employment tribunal.
Managed payroll with nobody to manage it
You’d hope outsourcing would solve this. For many businesses, it hasn’t.
Managed payroll was meant to give you specialists who know your business. Instead, plenty of providers have built a wall between clients and the people processing their payroll. Generic inboxes. Ticketing portals. Call centres with no line to the person who ran your payroll last Friday.
That’s annoying on a good day. On a bad day, it’s a serious problem.
I’ve spoken to businesses recently who had a payroll issue they weren’t happy with, and they had no idea how to escalate it. No visible chain of command. No named account manager. No clue who sits on the senior team, let alone how to reach a director. They knew something was wrong, their employees knew something was wrong, and they couldn’t find a single person with the authority to fix it.
When LinkedIn becomes the complaints department
Scroll through LinkedIn and you’ll see the result. Businesses posting their grievances in public, tagging their payroll or software provider, sharing screenshots of unanswered emails. Not because they want a public row, but because it’s the only route left that gets a response.
And it often works. The social media team jumps in within the hour with “we’re sorry to hear this, please DM us”.
Think about that for a second. The marketing team is more responsive than the payroll team and the leadership team. If a client has to shame you online before anyone senior responds, something has gone very wrong with how you run your business.
Payroll pays people’s mortgages, rent and bills. When it goes wrong, the people affected can’t wait for a ticket to work its way through a queue. They need someone who understands the problem and someone who’ll take responsibility for fixing it.
How we do things at Ascend
We built Ascend because we believed payroll deserved better. Our approach comes down to a few principles we won’t compromise on.
Experts you can reach. Our team is made up of highly experienced payroll professionals, many with decades in the industry. When you have a question, you speak to someone who knows payroll inside out, and who knows your payroll specifically.
Specialists when you need them. Some questions need deeper knowledge, whether that’s tronc schemes, salary sacrifice, benefits in kind, pensions or sector-specific rules for education, care and hospitality. Our clients get direct access to the specialists who handle exactly that.
A clear route to the top. Every client knows who their team is, who sits above them, and who leads the business. If you’re not happy with how something’s being handled, you’ll never need to guess who to talk to. That’s what a long-term payroll partnership looks like.
A leadership team that picks up the phone. I talk to our clients. So do our directors. We’d much rather hear about a problem early and directly than find out about it on LinkedIn. And we don’t wait to be asked – if we spot something that could affect your business, we’ll tell you first.
Systems that support people. We invest in technology that makes payroll accurate, fast and flexible. But tech is there to back up our people, never to replace the conversation.
Payroll should feel like a positive part of your business
Payroll doesn’t have to be a source of stress, guesswork or social media standoffs. With the right people behind it, it becomes something you don’t have to worry about, and something your employees can trust.
If you’re struggling to get answers from your current provider, or you’ve reached the point of drafting that LinkedIn post, let’s talk. You’ll get a real person. I promise.
