With thanks to our valued partners at Oak Team Associated Ltd for sharing their experiences:
How Oak Team Associates tamed auto enrolment
Specialisms: Business advisory, accounting services, payroll, VAT, tax returns, annual accounts
Established in 2004, Oak Team Associates is a thriving business advisory practice that provides its customers better answers to everyday business problems. It was this commitment and guiding principle that led Principal Director, David Logan, to seek a better, more common-sense solution to managing his customers’ auto enrolment duties.
Since the advent of auto enrolment in 2012, David found the auto enrolment pensions and services he was managing on behalf of his customers not all they were cracked up to be.
The challenges:
- Formatting payroll files for pension providers’ auto enrolment systems was taking too long
- Expensive payroll add-ons to facilitate NEST contributions were slow and frequently offline
- Changes to member data, processing new members and leavers required each individual record to be manually updated or set up
Adding complexity to the payroll process, auto enrolment was more than just a frustration for Oak Team Associates. It was a drag on productivity, taking time away from providing the valuable services that help their clients to grow. To ensure their practice remained true to its goals, they partnered with Creative to solve the auto enrolment conundrum.
”It was taking 4-5 minutes to process each client’s payroll file. With Creative, it’s 45 seconds on average. Multiply that by 50 payrolls a week and that’s a serious amount of time that I can put back into offering my clients valuable support.
David Logan | Principal Director | Oak Team Associates
The solution:
Since switching to Creative in 2015, Oak Associates have been so delighted with their experience that they have since migrated all of their customers from other providers.
- Saves time by providing a dedicated portal, set up and ready to go, that handles the entire auto enrolment process from start to finish in one place, including new members, leavers, and changes to personal data
- Saves money because we do not charge professional services advisers like accountants and payrolls, and we don’t require unreliable software plugins or extensive reconfiguration to work
- Saves hassle by allowing payroll to close first, validating contributions so small errors don’t snowball into big problems, and providing a dedicated team of friendly experts that live and breathe auto enrolment
”I have to say that this was a painless process and I’d like to thank you and all the team for their work in making this so simple.
David Logan
As Oak Team Associates say, common sense in business isn’t always that common, and they’re there to help inject that key ingredient to help their clients succeed. We’d like to think we’ve done the same for auto enrolment, but don’t just take our word for it:
”As soon as I saw Creative’s auto enrolment solution, I realised how slick the process could be. Everything happens in a straightforward and intuitive process. Now, it takes my business two clicks to download a payroll file and one to upload it to Creative and I can be confident that everything is neatly taken care of and 100% compliant.
David Logan | Principal Director | Oak Team Associates
