Member Article

Advanced’s HR and payroll software is key to Chesterton Humbert’s restructuring plans

Chesterton Humberts (Chestertons), one of the UK’s leading property consultancies, is using OpenHR and OpenPeople from Advanced Business Solutions (Advanced) to facilitate a major company restructuring scheduled for completion in June 2014. Chesterton Humberts will de-merge to form two limited companies and will use OpenHR and OpenPeople to efficiently manage the separation of all personnel and payroll records whilst continuing to provide services and support to all 650 staff.

Advanced is providing ongoing support and guidance to Chesterton’s HR team, which will enable them to manage the separation as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. Training provided also covers usage of OpenPeople’s pension auto enrolment and real time information (RTI) modules which were introduced in 2012 and 2013 respectively.

Chestertons originally implemented OpenHR in 2008 to replace the multiple spreadsheets being used to manage personnel records - a system prone to duplications and errors. Having successfully streamlined its efficiencies by centralising all personnel information within OpenHR, the company decided to deploy OpenPeople in 2010. In its first year of using the software, Chesterton saved £44K in annual payroll service bureau fees.

Tracy Millard, Payroll, Pensions and HR Office Manager from Chesterton Humberts comments: “OpenHR and OpenPeople are at the heart of operations and the support we receive from Advanced is excellent. The Advanced team walked us though functions that will enable us to manage payroll and HR for Chestertons and Humberts separately, without the need to invest in new software. This will result in substantial cost and time savings.”

Chestertons uses OpenHR to manage all employee information. This ranges from basic contact details to records of attendance, holidays, training, salaries, commissions and benefits such as pensions and healthcare.

Millard says, “The fact that OpenHR and OpenPeople are integrated means we only need to enter or update information once and it populates both systems. Once done, it is easy to reconcile the two systems each month and produce the monthly HR and salary reports we provide to our senior management teams.”

OpenHR is also used by Chesterton’s IT team who use it to stream photos, job titles, phone numbers and location information to the company’s intranet. The software is also configured to allow employee self-

service, meaning staff throughout the company can update their own records, saving the HR team hours in reduced administration every week.

Says Millard: “Advanced provides us with training as and when new features are added to OpenPeople. Their support helped us get to grips with the system’s new pension auto-enrolment and real time information functionality very quickly following the introduction of these schemes.”

Chestertons uses OpenPeople to prepare and provide real time information (RTI) to HMRC on a monthly basis. Under RTI, employers are required to inform HMRC of all tax, National Insurance contributions (NICs) and other deductions when or before the payments are made. OpenPeople automatically collates all information required and sends this electronically to HMRC.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Advanced Computer Software Group .