The pay rise that never reached payroll
Your consultant agrees a promotion and pay rise with a client's operations director and drafts the letter. The employee signs it. The consultant assumes the client will tell their payroll bureau. The client assumes your consultancy has. The employee's next payslip shows the old salary, and the first person they complain to is their manager, who rings your advice line annoyed.
Variations of this come up all the time: a leaver's last day entered wrongly, a new starter missed from the first pay run, a reduced hours agreement that nobody passed on, an unpaid leave deduction applied in the wrong month.
Why changes fall between the gaps
- HR changes are agreed in calls, cases and letters, but payroll works from a monthly cut-off list.
- Nobody owns the job of telling payroll, so everyone assumes someone else has.
- Changes are sent as free-text emails that payroll has to interpret.
- The client, your consultancy and the payroll bureau each keep their own list.
- Changes agreed after the cut-off are forgotten by the following month.
The HR work is usually done well. It is the handoff at the end that has no process.
What the errors cost
Employees who are paid wrongly lose trust quickly, and it colours how they see the whole employer. Correcting payroll after the fact takes time for the bureau, the client and your consultant. Some errors are awkward to unpick, such as overpayments that need recovering. And your consultancy, which did its part properly, still gets the blame because the client experienced it as an HR failure.
| Change | Common slip | How the change form helps |
|---|---|---|
| New starter | Missed from first pay run | Created from the contract, sent before cut-off |
| Pay rise | Old salary paid | Raised when the letter is issued |
| Leaver | Wrong last day or holiday pay basis | Dates from the case record, checked by client |
| Hours change | Not passed on | Raised automatically from the variation letter |
| Late change | Forgotten next month | Carried forward and flagged |
How we build the payroll handoff
- A single change form covers starters, leavers, pay changes, hours changes, leave affecting pay and one-off payments, with the fields payroll actually needs.
- Changes are raised automatically where possible: a new contract generated by your consultancy creates a starter change, a signed variation letter creates a pay or hours change, a closed leaver case creates a leaver change.
- The client's named approver confirms each change with one click, so there is a clear record that the client agreed it.
- Each client has a monthly change log with their payroll cut-off date, and reminders go out before cut-off for anything unapproved.
- At cut-off, the approved changes are sent to the payroll bureau as a clean report or as an import file for software such as Sage, BrightPay or Xero Payroll, depending on what the bureau accepts.
- Changes that miss the cut-off are carried to the next month automatically, with a flag, so nothing is forgotten.
- Payroll can mark each change as processed, closing the loop.
Pay calculations stay with the payroll bureau or the client's payroll team. The system makes sure the right information reaches them in time.
What changes
Everyone works from one list per client each month, and everyone can see its status. Changes are raised as a side effect of the HR work, so they are not forgotten. The payroll bureau receives structured information it can process without chasing. Employees are paid correctly more often, and when something does go wrong, the log shows exactly where. For your consultancy, it removes a recurring source of complaints about problems you did not cause.
Some consultancies also find it a useful service to offer on its own, to clients who have a bureau but no clear way of briefing it.
Is this your situation?
- Payroll changes are passed on by email, sometimes by several people.
- Employees have been paid wrongly after a change you handled.
- Nobody is sure who tells the payroll bureau.
- Changes after cut-off get forgotten.
- The client, you and payroll each keep a different list.