Getting Started with Isolved for Employers
The Isolved platform handles payroll, HR, and time management for UK employers, and the user guide is basically your entry point into not messing up your payroll run. It's not exactly the most intuitive piece of software, but once you understand the flow, it does what it needs to do. Start with the navigation. When you log in, you'll see a sidebar on the left with modules like Payroll, HR, Time Management, and Benefits. Each module has its own sub-menu. Don't skip reading through the initial setup section of the guide — it covers creating employee records, setting up payschemes, and configuring tax codes, which are the things that will bite you if you get wrong. I spent about two hours on my first payroll run because I didn't realise that employee gross earnings need to be populated before you can process the run, and that the system won't flag missing absences until after you attempt to generate the payslips. My workaround was to run a full data audit before each pay period. Export the employee list, cross-reference it against your timesheets, and check that every worker has an active payscheme attached. Takes about twenty minutes and has saved me from three missed payments.
The tax code configuration is where most people trip up. The guide explains the basics, but it doesn't mention that emergency tax codes can linger on employee profiles even after a P45 or P46 has been submitted. I found this out when a new starter was being taxed at the basic rate instead of the correct starting rate, and the error compounded across the whole month. The fix was manual: go into each new employee's payroll settings and verify their tax code against the HMRC codes list. Do this every time you onboard someone. Another thing the guide glosses over: the difference between a "standard" and "real-time" payslip generation. Standard runs batch everything at the end of the pay period. Real-time generates individual payslips as you update records. If you have a small team, real-time is fine. Once you cross roughly fifteen employees, it becomes unreliable because the system starts queueing requests and you can end up with partial runs that don't reconcile properly. Stick to standard batch processing for anything above a small workforce. The reporting section is decent but not comprehensive. You can generate payment summaries, tax summaries, and net pay reports, but the guide won't tell you that the statutory reporting export for EPS filings sometimes includes duplicate entries if you've processed more than one pay run in the same tax period. I learned that the hard way when HMRC flagged a discrepancy on my RTI submission. The workaround is to manually compare the EPS file against your internal ledger before submitting.
One limitation worth noting: Isolved doesn't integrate smoothly with all accounting software. The API connections exist, but they're often one-directional. You'll push payroll data out, but pulling journal entries back into your accounts package requires manual reconciliation. If your business runs entirely on automated bookkeeping, this is a bottleneck. Alternatives like Xero or Sage Business Cloud have tighter integrations, though they lack some of the HR depth that Isolved offers. For those just getting started, the onboarding webinars are actually useful. They run weekly and cover the platform's core functions in about forty minutes. The recordings stay available, so you can reference them later. Skip the sales demos and go straight to the technical training sessions. The subscription model is per employee per month, which sounds reasonable until you're processing payroll for seasonal staff that comes and goes. You pay for active and inactive employees alike unless you cancel their profiles entirely, which then requires re-onboarding paperwork when you need them back. Keep a separate tracker for temporary workers and cancel their records promptly when the contract ends to avoid paying for ghost employees.
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The customer support line is reactive rather than proactive. You'll wait on hold during peak payroll periods — typically the last five working days of each month. If you have a complex issue, raise it mid-cycle so you're not stuck on day twenty-eight of the pay period with no resolution timeline.
