L-R: Jason and Sarah Dowzell with Giovanni Finocchio (wearing jacket) – Photo credit: Dave Warren/Picture Team
Growing customer demand, coupled with recent investment from venture capital firm Midven, has prompted cloud-based HR tech platform, Natural HR, to develop a fully integrated payroll function.
Established by couple Co-Founders, Jason and Sarah Dowzell, Natural HR has seen significant growth since 2013, when the platform went from being a hobby to a full-blown business for the pair. Having identified a demand in the market for this HR tech solution, and capitalising on the surge in popularity of cloud storage, and with the additional support from local investors, Midven, the couplepreneurs now employ over 20 staff members and seem intent on continuing to develop solutions that make the lives of those managing HR systems easier.
The launch of the payroll function, announced this week, marks another notable stage in the organisation’s story, as they are one of the first HR tech cloud-based platform’s in the UK to offer a fully integrated payroll solution.
Says Sarah Dowzell, Co-Founder and COO of Natural HR, “Over the last three to five years, we’ve noticed a shift in where payroll sits in terms of responsibility. Increasingly HR is becoming responsible for managing payroll rather than finance and ensuring details are not only accurately provided when an employee joins but accurately maintained when circumstances shift during their time as an employee. Many organisations face the challenge of running these two systems in isolation, which causes risk and complexity. At its worst, this can result in employees being paid the wrong salaries into the wrong bank accounts or even businesses continuing to pay employees once they have left the business.
Being able to respond to the growing demands of our clients is thanks to the funding we received from Midven. It is clear that eliminating the risk of payroll related mishaps, as well as having a central system on which data can be added, edited and managed – and one system that speaks to all departments involved – was very much in demand. Whilst some other software platforms offer the ‘add-on’ of payroll, this is very often a third-party system with a different interface and, if they are lucky, a synchronisation process running in the background but this still presents interface and usability challenges. Ours is fully integrated and designed by our team of developers who devised our original HR management software from scratch with the same simple and logical look and feel as Natural HR meaning no new interfaces to learn and an employee is only added, changed or removed once whilst still integrating fully with your approval processes! We recognise not all HR professionals are ‘finance trained’ so we’ve ensured the function is accessible and straightforward.”
The integrated payroll function within the existing HR tech software will be available to the UK market this June.
