Payroll, payroll, payroll… “but does it work for payroll?”. As a sales lead dealing with accountants daily, this is a question that I get asked a lot about Comma. It’s clear there is an enormous appetite in industry to change the way businesses process salary payments on a weekly and monthly basis.

These days, there are many amazing and exciting payroll systems that help businesses across the UK prepare salary runs for their staff. You can now automatically calculate PAYE, pension submissions and produce payslips quicker than ever before. Fantastic! The problem is, that’s only half the battle won. You still need to actually pay these people. That payment piece of the puzzle is what we have been working hard to supply.

Working closely with payroll platforms such as Xero and BrightPay and a bunch of our enthusiastic payroll clients, we have put the first steps in place to fill just that void. The first phase of this was supporting CSV upload for payroll payments. This allows users to create a list of payments and upload them to Comma to create an immediate virtual payment run. Users can then share this with key stakeholders to initiate a payment, in bulk, via the business bank account. An integration with BrightPay means that BrightPay customers can download this CSV directly from their platform and create a virtual payment in seconds through the Comma platform.

The process:

Prepare payroll -> Export from BrightPay -> Import to Comma -> Schedule the payment date and pay.

Customers loved it, but it only catered for part of the market. We had a lot of users running payroll using platforms that only supported a BACS file export, and to rub it in, their bank account didn’t support BACS import. We decided to look at ways to help these users by supporting different file types, particularly the Xero payroll export file. Following our previous success with CSV upload, we managed to re-create the user flow. By replicating this flow, we have granted users the ability to download the BACS file direct from Xero and create a virtual payment run in Comma.

Connecting the data from a payroll platform with a business bank account is an instant win. It mitigates against mistakes (if you have ever paid an employee the wrong amount, then you know the headache!), removes manual entry and amplifies the services accountants can provide their clients.