4th April 2016
When you last tendered for your payroll service did it meet your needs, or was it a fraught process that rather ran out of time and ended up as a compromise.
I recently met up with a great payroller in London who simply didn’t have the time to put together an RFP or ITT but was targeted to achieve a change by her board, and in a timescale that was demanding to say the least. Worse still she thought that the whole payroll tenders process would be a waste of time, as one of the directors had a clear view of who he wanted to use, and held the deciding vote. Sounds familiar?
It’s a difficult choice for payroll managers. You want to be clear and transparent from an audit viewpoint internally, and indeed you may be subject to OJEU regulations anyway. But for the most part payrollers are missing a trick by going down the payroll tenders route with a long list of things they think they need, when actually a collaborative approach, with the supplier offering real input, would be the way forward.
Don’t get me wrong, tenders can be really useful, but sometimes you end up just getting what you wanted, and not actually what you need.
If you do have to tender how can you make sure that you’ve got a useful document? Coming from outside the payroll industry I’ve been involved with and seen some great tenders and I believe that the CIPP should be taking the lead in this.
One of my abiding memories of good tender support was the introduction by the British Parking Association, the parking industry’s professional association, of the model contract and tender, designed to give help, advice and a framework for anyone seeking to outsource their service. Should the CIPP be looking at this? Absolutely.
IRIS FMP Payroll Services has been a long-time advocate of transparency in the industry, so any support from the CIPP to support this initiative would be welcome. In the meantime our advice would be, where you can, just shortlist two to three known suppliers from your professional experience and get them in, so that you can test this collaboration idea. Believe me it will be worth it, with a better solution for your business with the right supplier.
