A UK payroll desk for accountancy and bookkeeping practices. Your brand on the payslips, your client stays yours. Get a wholesale quote →
For accountants and bookkeepers

Your payroll desk, under your own brand

Payroll runs every month whether or not anyone in your practice is free. It does not move for January, it does not move for year end, and the deadline is on or before payday rather than the end of the month. We take that off your desk and run it under your name.

✓ We never contact your client. That is a term of the engagement, not a promise.

The idea

You keep the client, the relationship and your own engagement terms. We process the payroll, file the RTI and run the pension duties, and it all goes out with your branding on it. You pay a wholesale rate and bill your client whatever you choose.

Payroll is usually the line a practice would most like to hand over. It is deadline-penalised, it carries liabilities you cannot delegate to a junior, and it is the hardest fee in the practice to put up. It is also the one mistake a client takes personally, because it is their staff and their wages.

What you stop carrying

  • The monthly treadmill. Payroll does not flex around Self Assessment season, year end or holidays. We absorb the calendar so January stays yours.
  • The RTI deadline. The FPS is due on or before every payday, not at month end, and late filing is penalised. We file on or before each pay date.
  • Auto-enrolment. Assessment every pay period, opt-ins and opt-outs, the statutory communications, contribution uploads, the declaration of compliance, and re-enrolment every three years. Included in full, never invoiced separately.
  • Key-person risk. The one person who knows the payrolls is a risk while they are there and a bigger one the day they leave. A documented desk does not resign.
  • P11D season. Benefits in kind, P11Ds, the P11D(b) and Class 1A are in the monthly fee, on the same basis as our direct clients.

The question you are actually asking

"Will you take my client?"

No, and we would rather answer it with the contract than with a reassurance. Four clauses in our white-label engagement letter, which is with your firm and not with your client:

  • ✓ We will not contact your client in any medium, for any reason, unless you ask us to in writing. If one contacts us, we tell you and do nothing substantive without your instruction.
  • ✓ We will not market to or accept direct instructions from your clients during the engagement or for 12 months after it ends. It runs both ways.
  • ✓ We will not advise your client. All advice is yours, in your name, on your terms. You stay the adviser of record.
  • ✓ We stay in the payroll lane. We never become the employer, never hold or move money, and never act as an Employer of Record.

How it works

  1. You send us the client's payroll details and the pay calendar. We set the scheme up with HMRC, or take over the existing one.
  2. Each period you send the data at least five working days before pay date, in the agreed format.
  3. We process, and send you the figures, the amounts due to HMRC and the deadlines, in a form you can pass straight on.
  4. You approve the run. Nothing is filed with HMRC without your sign-off.
  5. We submit the RTI, produce the payslips under your branding, and run the pension duties.
  6. You or your client make the payments. We never make them and never hold client money.

Wholesale pricing

You pay this. What you bill your client is entirely your business.

Per clientWholesale rate
UK payroll£50/mo + £6 per payslip
Setup, per client scheme£75
Partner onboarding£0

Minimum three client payrolls. Below that the standard direct rates apply. We are not VAT registered, so no VAT is added and the price shown is the total. DPNI and DCNI schemes are not offered white-label at present: refer those clients to us directly through the partners page.

Setup is invoiced only once the scheme is live with HMRC. We carry that work at risk until it is.

Who this suits

A good fit

  • ✓ A practice that does payroll grudgingly, or has stopped offering it
  • ✓ Three or more client payrolls, monthly paid
  • ✓ A practice whose payroll person has left, or is about to
  • ✓ Bookkeepers who want to offer payroll without building the function
  • ✓ Anyone with an overseas-employer client and a DPNI or DCNI problem

What we don't take on

  • · Fewer than three client payrolls, where the direct rates are the honest answer
  • · Umbrella and CIS bureau volume, which we price separately rather than off this card
  • · Anyone wanting us to hold client money or make the HMRC payments
  • · Anyone wanting an Employer of Record

Before the first client moves

Two documents exist and both are signed before anything starts. We would rather set them out than have them arrive as a surprise.

  • A white-label engagement letter with your firm. It sets out the branding, the non-solicitation both ways, and states expressly that we owe no duty of care to your clients.
  • An AML reliance arrangement. Our client is your firm, so we do our checks on you. Where we rely on your due diligence on your own clients, that has to be in writing, and the liability stays with us either way.

We are registered with the ICO (ZC200180). Onshore Partners is a trading name of Bolton Whitby Limited, company 16629965.

Talk to us

Tell us roughly how many client payrolls you have, how often they are paid, and what is prompting the change. We will come back with a fixed wholesale quote, usually within one UK business day.

Get a wholesale quote

Already working with overseas clients? The partner options page covers referrals as well as white-label. Prefer to see the direct service first? That is our payroll service and pricing.