Hi Jonathan
Thanks you for your quick response. Although I focussed in my last post on all the things FreeAgent does not do, it is worth spelling what I do look for FreeAgent to do for me re Payroll so as to clarify what the point of separation / decoupling from timekeeping systems.
I love the fact that FreeAgent calculates all UK tax for me and the employees and is kept in line with current legislation. I give all my employees logins to FreeAgent for want of a better word for Tax Self Service - view payslips , download P60 / P45 etc. With the salary payments going through the bank I can then double check by looking at the payroll accounts that I have not mis paid anyone.
Although some of your competitors have gone down the route of trying to cram a timesheet management / recording system into their accounting offerings, I think this is a mistake. In my particular case I run a shift management / rota system that the staff can record their arrival / departure / break in. It has lots of features GPS location of sign in etc hence why I think accounting systems should stick to their bit.
The net result of all of this is I have a set of users ( i can even assign them external identifiers) with a total number of hours worked and gross pay due to them in the system. This would be the first point of call into FreeAgent: create a Gross Payslip in FreeAgent for that user / period. I would expect myself to have made the relevant API calls prior to this to ascertain the user freeagent URL etc. For new employees, I would need to be able to setup a Payroll profile for them using the API as well. I would then review / sanity check them in FreeAgent.
Finally I would love to press a button and have a BACS file sent automatically to my bank to pay them. I have to confess on this last step I am bit unsure of what is possible banking wise. I have to manually type each net figure into a rather crude Bulk Payment screen on Barclays.