For practices · How white label works

White-label payroll: what your client sees and what they do not

The objection to white-label payroll is almost never about price. It is about the client relationship, and specifically the fear that the moment somebody else touches the payroll, the client is one step away from being someone else's. Here is what the arrangement actually looks like.

What your client sees

Your firm. The payslips carry your branding. The year-end documents come from you. Any communication about payroll comes from your address, in your name.

They send changes to you as they always have. They approve the run with you. If they have a question they ask you, and you answer it, because you have the information in front of you.

From the client's side, nothing has changed. That is the whole point of the arrangement and it is not a marketing claim, it is a structural feature: they are never given a reason to know a third party exists.

What happens behind it

You pass the monthly changes to us. We process, check and prepare the run, and send it back for your approval. Nothing goes out until you have approved it.

Once approved, we file the FPS, produce the payslips in your branding, handle the pension submissions and deal with the HMRC correspondence. At year end we produce the P60s and handle the year-end filings.

You keep the relationship and the fee. We do the processing and carry the deadline.

The questions worth asking, including the awkward ones

Will you ever contact my client? The answer should be no, unqualified, and it should be in the agreement rather than in a conversation.

What happens if you get it wrong? You want to know who corrects it, at whose cost, and how quickly. A bureau that has not thought about this will be vague.

What if I want to bring it back in-house? This is the real fear behind the relationship worry. You want a clear answer on notice, and on getting the year-to-date figures and the RTI history back in a usable form.

Who is my day-to-day contact? A named person matters more than a support address when a pay date is tomorrow.

Any bureau worth using will answer all four without hedging. If the answers are evasive, that tells you what you need to know before a client is involved.

What it does not solve

It does not remove your responsibility to your client. You remain their accountant and the relationship is yours, which is the point, but it means you are still the person they hold accountable.

It does not remove the need to know roughly what is going on. You should still be able to answer a basic payroll question without forwarding it.

And it does not fix a client who sends their changes four days late every month. That remains a conversation only you can have.

Where it works best

Practices where payroll is real but not core. Practices where one person holds all of it and that has started to feel risky. Practices that have stopped taking payroll clients because they have no capacity, and are quietly losing the year-end work that comes attached.

That last one is the case where the arrangement pays for itself several times over, because the constraint was never the payroll fee.

How we do it

We run payroll wholesale for UK practices under their own brand. We do not contact your clients and we do not sell to them, and that is in the agreement rather than a promise. The rates are on the partners page, along with what is included and what is not.