Completely automated UK payroll process with Pento

🚨 Forecast's challenge

Forecast is a fast growing company that is rapidly expanding into the UK market. At the start of 2020 they needed to find a scalable and modern way to pay their new UK team. Finance director Amjad Khan has heard about Pento while at his previous company and turned to us with the following challenges:

• Can Forecast easily run UK payroll via Pento and without external payroll advisors? Forecast’s finance team doesn’t have a payroll specialist, yet they still want to run payroll internally to avoid the overhead and cost of working with an external service provider.
• Will Pento be able to support their ever-expanding team? Forecast is growing quickly and wouldn't want to switch to a new payroll provider after 6 months or so.

Amjad Khan, Forecast’s Finance Director: “I’ve heard about Pento before, but had never used it. When we were entering the UK market I quickly needed a solution to support our payroll process and Pento came to mind. My main objective was to find a reliable partner that can support our growth and enable my team to focus on important tasks - instead of doing menial and error-prone things like constantly exchanging multiple spreadsheets with an external payroll provider.”

🔀 Onboarding to Pento

Once Forecast has transferred the initial employee data, Pento’s team imported it all to the platform. This means that everything was ready for Forecast to get started once they logged on to the platform and there was no manual entry needed. All they had to do was connect to HMRC and the pension provider and they were ready to run UK payroll the very next day.

✅ The Pento solution

Here’s the parts of Pento’s solution that are the most valuable for Forecast:

• Fully automated UK payroll system: there’s no need for reporting to HMRC, no need for enrolling employees to pension or making manual bank transfers. Pento does everything automatically; Forecast’s team only ensures that the employee earnings and data are correct.
• Quick and comprehensive support: Pento’s team’s promise is to always deliver reliable and extremely quick support. Forecast is thus able to fully depend on Pento whenever they face a new question.

💯 The Key Outcomes for Forecast

Forecast has been running Pento for the past couple of months while quickly scaling their UK team. Here’s the most important results for them:

• Simplest way to run UK payroll: running payroll with Pento means that they have full control and visibility into the process without the need to become payroll experts. It’s the best of both worlds.
• Scalable payroll solution: adding employees on Pento is extremely easy and future upgrades to the platform will make it smooth for Forecast to continue growing on Pento.

Amjad Khan, Forecast’s Finance Director added: “We’ve been very satisfied with Pento so far. Even when we’ve encountered an issue that we couldn’t figure out, their team was always extremely quick to help. We also see that the platform is developing very quickly - basically every payroll there are some new functionalities that make it easier to run the whole process. I can recommend it to all UK scale-ups and I can’t imagine running payroll any other way - it’s how payroll should be.”

🔜 What's next?

Pento is currently also working on several enhancements that will make it even easier for Forecast to scale their UK team: integration with Quickbooks accounting, integration with their HR system (BambooHR) and enhancements to the user experience that will make it easier to get the overview over a big amount of employees.