Partner Article

Bond Payroll Services supports Avery Healthcare rapid expansion

Avery Care Homes has chosen Bond Payroll Services to provide it with an outsourced payroll model to support its ongoing rapid acquisition and growth plans, which have seen the business expand to 50 care homes with 4,000 employees and created diverse payroll requirements.

As with many care homes, Avery has a variety of roles including housekeeping, kitchen and care assistants, working less than 30 hours per week, across diverse shifts, meaning that Avery has a complex and ever changing payroll overhead. Following the standard model within the care sector, the company runs each home as a separate limited company – an approach that creates 50 individual payrolls both four weekly and monthly.

Given the rapid expansion, Avery’s management wanted to ensure the company was well placed to support aggressive growth objectives. A key aspect of this strategy was an outsourced payroll model and the existing service provided by a local firm of accountants could not offer the scalability or flexibility required to manage another 50 to 90 staff with each care home added.

Having reviewed the market, Avery opted to outsource its payroll to Bond Payroll Services. In addition to an ability to support Avery’s rapidly changing staff numbers, Bond also offered a far slicker payroll model and delivered in depth reporting.

Jugdeep Singh, Group Commercial Accountant, Avery Healthcare comments, “With this number of care homes accurate reporting is essential to enable efficient operations. The existing service was provided by a local firm and could not provide the scalability or flexibility required to manage the additional staff with each care home added. Bond’s approach significantly reduces the amount of time required by our payroll managers, and is able to scale with our business growth.”

Avery has also deployed a Time & Attendance (T&A) solution at each care home to capture the hours worked by staff. The system provides an export at month end which is sent to Bond Payroll Services to create the payroll. In addition to undertaking all the PAYE and deduction calculations, Bond also provides Avery with a nominal journal which can be quickly imported into the company’s finance system.

Singh comments, “The nominal journal provides us with accurate payroll information, which is an essential factor in managing costs each month. The speed of turnaround is also excellent, with payrolls provided typically within a day of Bond receiving the T&A information – even quicker if there is a specific issue to address.”

Singh concludes, “With an outsourced provider, I don’t have to worry whether we have 50 homes, 100 or 10. In April 2013 we sold some homes and dropped down to 15; now we are back up to 50. All we have to do is to tell Bond that 15 payrolls are moving elsewhere or that there will be 30 new payrolls next month and the implementation team gets ready. It just works.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by itpr .