A spreadsheet with forty columns and no headers
A client has won a contract to provide cleaning services at a hospital site, and forty staff are transferring from the outgoing contractor. Your consultancy is supporting the client. The outgoing employer sends employee information: a spreadsheet with merged cells, abbreviations nobody explains, some staff listed twice, pay rates in three different formats and a column headed 'other' that holds everything from union membership to a note about a grievance.
Your consultant has to turn that into something the client can use to plan payroll, contracts, rotas and consultation. They start by copying it into a clean sheet, one row at a time, and emailing questions to a contact at the outgoing employer who is not in a hurry to help.
Why transfer data is so messy
- The outgoing employer is losing the contract and has little reason to prioritise the handover.
- Data comes from several of their systems: payroll, rostering, HR and managers' own lists.
- Terms differ person by person, with legacy contracts and individual arrangements.
- There is no agreed format, so every transfer starts from scratch.
- Updates arrive in new versions of the spreadsheet, and nobody can see what changed.
What it costs
Consultant time on data cleaning rather than on the transfer itself. Pay and terms entered wrongly into the client's payroll, which upsets staff on day one. Questions to the outgoing employer that go unanswered because nobody can list exactly what is missing. Late surprises, such as an employee whose working pattern does not fit the incoming rota, discovered in the week of transfer.
| Data problem | Common effect | What the tool does |
|---|---|---|
| Missing fields | Guesses on day one | Listed per employee for follow-up |
| Inconsistent pay formats | Payroll errors | Normalised to one format for checking |
| Duplicates | Wrong headcount | Flagged for a person to resolve |
| New versions | Changes missed | Differences between versions highlighted |
| Individual terms | Overlooked | Listed for consultant review |
How we build transfer data collection
- We set up a structured template covering the fields your advisers want collected, with clear definitions for each one.
- The outgoing employer is invited to upload through a secure portal, either filling the template or uploading their own files, which we map to the template with a person checking the mapping.
- Automatic checks run on upload: missing values, impossible dates, duplicate people, hours that do not match pay, and fields outside expected ranges.
- A gap list per employee is generated and can be sent to the outgoing employer as a clear set of questions, with their answers written back to the record.
- Each new upload is compared with the last, and changes are highlighted, so late additions and corrections are visible.
- Transferring employees' terms are compared with the incoming employer's standard terms, showing differences for your consultant to review.
- Once confirmed, the data can be exported in the format the client's payroll or HR system needs, such as a BreatheHR or Sage import file.
What information must be provided, what the transfer means for terms, and how consultation is carried out are for your advisers and the client's. The tool handles the data, not the law.
What the consultant gets back
Clean data early, a precise list of what is missing, and visibility of every change. The client's payroll and rota planning can start from reliable information. Questions to the outgoing employer are specific, which makes them harder to ignore. And because the template is reusable, the next transfer starts from a known format instead of a blank sheet.
For consultancies that support clients who bid for service contracts, this becomes a repeatable part of the offer rather than a painful one-off.
Do transfers look like this for you?
- Employee data arrives in whatever format the outgoing employer chooses.
- Consultants spend days cleaning spreadsheets.
- You cannot easily say what information is still missing.
- New versions of the data arrive and changes are missed.
- Payroll problems on day one of a transfer are familiar.