Established in 1968 as a firm of Consulting Civil & Structural Engineers, Manchester based Alan Wood & Partners (www.alanwood.co.uk) are a recognised market leading provider of professional management and engineering design services. They work with clients to realise their aspirations and plans from initial feasibility and concept studies through to delivery and operation of facilities.
With a significant technical staff resource the company is one of the largest of its kind in the north of England and has demonstrable capability in Project Management, Building Surveying, Geotechnical and Geochemical Investigations and reporting, Geo-environmental Investigations and reporting, Topographic Surveys, Infrastructure Design, Specialist Foundation Design, Refurbishments and Flood Risk Assessments all of which complement the core business of Civil & Structural Engineering.
The Company holds accreditations to ISO 9001, ISO 14001, CHAS, Constructionline, Achilles Link-up and CATCH.
Alan Wood & Partners are active across a wide range of sectors and major construction projects both locally and nationally. They have established a solid reputation for their expert and professional approach, combined with core values based around Client care, agility and quality deliverables. This has assisted in controlled, planned and successful growth of the business.
Their specialist teams add value to each project offering clients practical, cost-effective and innovative solutions for the most diverse engineering problems. They use the latest technology, which coupled with their technical experts deliver solutions to meet the complex challenges faced by their clients today and consistently deliver the services, flexibility and trust needed to make each project a success.
Sage HR and P11D for efficiency
Alan Wood and Partners use the very popular Sage 200 Accounting System which was recommended and implemented by Sage Business Partner CPiO in Birmingham who also provides their ongoing technical support. Jayne is a long term associate of CPiO and delivers Sage Payroll solution training to their clients.
Caroline Neal took over the Management Accountant role at the Alan Wood group headquarters in Hull just prior to the P11d filing deadline and realised that completing this task manually via spreadsheets may not be the quickest route. As their payroll processing was being outsourced and their HR system was also held manually, Caroline did not have an easy electronic import route to setting up the individual employee records in Sage P11d. Although they held impeccable records of the P11d information, getting this into HMRC compliant format was going to be time consuming and would of course need to be calculated manually too. It was decided to implement Sage 50 HR and Sage P11d as they share a common database and would kill two birds with one stone.
Sage 50 HR and P11D bespoke training workshop
Jayne delivered a 4 day bespoke workshop spread over a two week period on behalf of CPiO training Caroline and her team how to set up and customise the Sage 50 HR system and how best to input all of their manual Absence and Holiday records, Training Course and Qualification records together with their Appraisal and Timekeeping data to maximise their reporting potential and deliver electronic reports to the branch team leaders across the north of the UK. Once the Sage 50 HR database was complete, Jayne then imported the core employee record data into Sage P11d to relieve the team of having to manually input this information again. The team were then shown how to enter the benefit in kind data to Sage P11d, which reports to take to verify accuracy and finally how to produce and email the integral electronic forms directly to the relevant employees and transmit them and the Employer’s P11d(b) declaration straight from Sage P11d to the HMRC website. A final workshop was delivered to help customise their Sage 50 HR reports in a format required by their team leaders.
A short while later, the decision was taken to bring Payroll processing back in house as they felt a lot of time was being spent sending information to and from their Payroll bureau. Jayne had advised that once the payroll database had been created, they might spend less time inputting the monthly payroll variables directly into their own system and instantly verifying the accuracy instead of the rather lengthy process of checking their Payroll bureau processing and having to spend more time communicating with the Payroll bureau and constantly re-checking corrections.
Sage 50 Payroll was purchased and once again, Jayne was able to import the core employee data records straight from Sage 50 HR which was now fully up and running. Jayne then delivered a one day workshop showing them how best to setup the pay elements, departments and cost centres that would ultimately create their payroll journal in .csv format automatically at the end of the payroll process to import into their Sage 200 accounting system. Payroll journals were calculated and created manually from reports provided by their Payroll bureau at that point and were taking almost two days per month to complete so this was a very welcome solution for Caroline.
A further one day workshop was delivered to show the team how to process Sage 50 Payroll from start to finish including automatically processing HMRC notifications sent straight to the software, Auto Enrolment assessment, emailing payslips and transmitting RTI submissions directly back to HMRC. As the current tax year had already been partly processed by their Payroll bureau, Jayne advised running the payroll in parallel to naturally update the Year to Date employee figures rather than having to input all of these figures manually per employee. She also advised that the other advantages were of course that they would have a full year’s history on their own Payroll system, they would be able to verify accuracy as soon as the monthly variables were entered and it took care of training them how to run their own Payroll.