Our Story – How things started

I readily admit that I fell into the Payroll world by chance. Prior to setting up Payroll Sorted in 2010 (we were actually called Fineline Bookkeeping & Payroll Solutions back then…) I actually owned a recruitment business. Apart from trying to place people into new jobs, we also had a small temporary workforce that we were hiring out to businesses.
My first introduction to payroll was ensuring that the temp workers got paid each week. I knew nothing about PAYE, HMRC and all that stuff… I just knew I had to get them paid every Friday and give them a payslip, how hard could it be? I asked my Accountant to take care of the Payroll for me, job done… I thought!

It was anything but straightforward, every Friday, like clockwork, around lunchtime the phone would start ringing. It was the temp workers with payroll issues, “my hours are wrong” or “my tax seems high”.  I would spend my Friday afternoons going back and forth with the Accountant, undertaking revisions and changes until everyone was happy, this was happening every week. In an effort to solve the headaches, I tried different payroll providers, but really struggled to find a cost effective, reliable and error free service.

So, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I learnt how to process the payroll myself. I enrolled on a payroll course (ha, a 1 day course), bought the software and started running payroll myself. And guess what… the payroll started running smoothly, the weekly issues stopped – problem solved.

Then in 2009 came the ‘Credit Crunch’. Being a business that made its money placing people in jobs became tough when businesses weren’t looking to take new employees on and were making redundancies instead… I was struggling financially. I had bills and a mortgage to pay, I needed to find something else and quick. I kept on thinking and coming back to the same thought process, if I’d had issues with finding a Payroll provider, maybe other business owners had too? So seeing an opportunity, I decided to break away from recruitment.

I had a quick website built, flyers made and that was the start of what we are now. Since processing that first weekly payroll, we now work with over 2000 clients. We took a bit of a strange route to entering this industry, but we have been on an epic ride ever since!!