Top 7 Payroll Companies in the UK and London 2023

With the HRMC requiring your expenses and benefits report as well as your P11D submissions in July, you’d be wise to use a system that helps you to have all these documents ready in time.

For our money, Moorepay is the best payroll company in the UK, due to its expert advice and custom reporting – features that made it stand out in our independent research. Businesses with small (or no) accounting teams, in particular, will greatly benefit from having access to Moorepay’s consultants.

That said, we were also impressed with six other providers in our analysis – one of which might serve you better depending on your needs. To help you choose the most suited to your business, we analysed our top picks and compared them in categories such as reporting, integrations, and support facilities. If you’d like to know our findings, just head to our list below.

Prices correct as of May 2023

1. Moorepay: Best payroll company in the UK overall

Moorepay lands the top spot in our ranking largely due to its calling card: expert advice. The provider allows you to access UK-based payroll specialists who can answer your queries and give you guidance on HR, payroll, and tax matters. This helpful feature offers incredible support to companies, especially those that don’t have a big or experienced accounting team.

Unlike Payescape and Advanced, Moorepay lacks a London office: Moorepay’s headquarters are located in Swinton, in the Greater Manchester area.

Moorepay’s onboarding process impressed our researchers: if you’re switching payroll companies and moving over to Moorepay, it handles any legislative or policy changes that your business might need.

Like MHR, Moorepay offers a native HR platform that fully integrate with its payroll one – but unlike that competitor, it offers live training sessions and has an interface that’s easier to grasp. This led to Moorepay featuring highly in our ranking of the best payroll solutions for small businesses.

On the flip side, for all its easy onboarding, Moorepay doesn’t offer live training sessions – a crucial feature if you’d like your company to get hold of the system fast. In comparison, ADP offers this.

2. Payescape: Best for transparent pricing

Shortlisted at the CIPP Annual Excellence Awards 2022 (befitting the CIPP-accredited advice it offers), Payescape boasts two key assets that are hard to come by in the payroll industry: transparent pricing and a London-based office.

Payescape’s advertised pricing is a major plus, since competitors like MHR or ADP don’t advertise theirs. In fact, as we discovered in our deep-dive research into payroll companies, it is fairly common in this field for providers not to be forthcoming with pricing, so having this information upfront benefits businesses keen on getting their payroll software promptly.

As for the office, Payescape has a North London location, with easy access via Underground and Thameslink stations, which means London-based businesses can easily count on the company for in-person support. Considering that, unlike TopSource, Payescape only offers a fully-managed service, the ability to meet the team handling your payroll process offers much needed peace of mind to business owners.

However, our researchers did find issues with some of the provider’s data standards. For starters, it’s the only payroll company we researched that doesn’t store its data in the UK (its servers are in the US). Because of this, it’s subject to a different data protection jurisdiction and legislation (GDPR, for instance, isn’t applicable there). Payescape is also the only provider we looked into that lacks the ISO 27001 accreditation, meaning it could work harder on its data security compliance.

3. MHR: Best for reporting

MHR is best poised to help business owners and C-suite executives that really want to make the most out of the employee data at their disposal. Our researchers used its native iTrent program to run highly-detailed tasks, from pinpointing costs and analysing employee performance, and were impressed by its data crunching.

Like Moorepay, it already comes with an integrated HR platform, allowing you to save money on that front. It also has an incredibly high standard when it comes to data compliance, attested by its ISO:27001 accreditation (something Payescape doesn’t have).

For accounting teams that need to present their performance data to key stakeholders, MHR’s powerful visualisation tools allow for your data to be organised in compelling graphs. For its sheer scope, we’d especially recommend MHR to larger organisations, that can benefit more from the provider’s analytic prowess.

Like Frontier, MHR doesn’t have a London location but has two UK-based offices: one in Nottingham, and the other in Glasgow. That said, if these locations are far from you, MHR is available via phone and chatbot, though not via email – a contact channel that ADP also lacks.

Crucially, for a system this resourceful, MHR doesn’t offer live training sessions to ease your onboarding process. This puts it on par with TopSource, but behind Advanced and Payescape, which do offer live training. It could also pose an issue, if you need your team to operate this software at its fullest capacity as soon as possible.

You’re just over halfway through our list of the 7 best payroll services providers in the UK. Time to start comparing quotes?

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4. Frontier: Best for international businesses

Frontier’s ability to pay international employees makes it ideal to help businesses that operate in multiple countries organise their payroll. Like Moorepay, it doesn’t have a London office, but it does pack four UK locations to cater to its clientele: headquarters in Lightwater, a helpdesk in Warrington, plus offices in Nottingham and Gloucester.

Like ADP, Frontier packs a mobile app, which allows both employees and managers to easily check and edit their payroll data on the go. With it, timesheets can be submitted on mobile devices and payslips can be sent straight to them.

Similarly to MHR, Frontier already comes with an integrated HR platform, which is a money-saving feature considering you won’t have to employ a different system to handle these processes.

However, Frontier’s lack of an open API is an Achilles’ heel for the provider, since it prevents you from integrating it with other platforms. Among the providers we tested, it shares this trait with Advanced. Our researchers also highlighted the fact that it doesn’t come with ready-made accounting software integrations, which means tracking labour expenses is difficult with Frontier. Overall, if third-party integrations are key to your business, ADP is a better choice.

Frontier also doesn’t provide guidance on how to stay compliant to business , which isn’t great to those in need of this extra information.

5. Advanced: Best for training

Advanced’s offering puts a lot of agency in the hands of accounting teams. Its training sessions are great for professionals keen on learning the ins and outs of the system quickly, but it also packs material that allows them to pick this knowledge up at their own pace.

Also, because it works both as a software and as an outsourced payroll service, it’s best suited to serve businesses who want more agency over their payroll process than they’d get with Payescape, which only offers a fully-managed service.

If your business needs in-person support with your payroll, great news: Advanced has the highest number of UK offices among the companies we analysed. It’s got a London office within walking distance from City Airport, as well as eight others across the country.

You can tailor the software to your business’ specific needs, setting up payroll for multiple sites, and employees with complex salaries and bonuses. Its reporting, while powerful, isn’t as comprehensive as MHR’s – but Advanced beats this competitor by offering live training, which MHR doesn’t.

However, the provider doesn’t come with a mobile app (Moorepay, for instances, offers this). Also, like Frontier, its lack of an open API is a problem if your company hopes to integrate software you’re already using with Advanced. While the provider packs a native suite of programs that’s likely cover your needs when it comes to HR and accounting, this will force you to migrate your data from your current platforms to these new ones, which can be time-consuming.

6. ADP: Best for security

ADP’s ISO 27001 certification attests its efficient data encrypting. On that front, it beats Payescape by having that certification and trumps Advanced by not suffering any data breaches in the last two years.

ADP maintains two locations in the UK, both in the outskirts of major cities: its headquarters in Staines-upon-Thames (27km from London) and its Northern office in Cheadle (13km from Manchester).

The provider is flexible and you can choose the add-on features and services your business needs. It also offers guidance around payroll issues, services, and legislation, and more.

Like MHR, it offers a mobile app. Conveniently, it can be used as a clock-in system, which helps employees with rotating shift patterns to ensure their hours are being recorded correctly.

However, its pricing isn’t transparent, which can be a problem if you run a small business and need to quickly find out whether ADP fits your budget. For its part, this is standard practice in this industry, but some competitors (such as Payescape and Iris Staffology) do advertise their prices, and are worth considering.

7. TopSource: Best for native integrations

TopSource offers worldwide services, but has an office in Birmingham and can tackle UK-specific payroll procedures. Unlike Advanced, it lacks a London office. However, it can be contacted through phone and email if Birmingham is too far from your venture. The providers allows you to contact CIPP-accredited experts for assistance.

TopSource’s native suite is quite comprehensive, packing HR, recruitment, and employee benefits platforms. Our researchers’ only reservation towards it is that it doesn’t have an employee development software – something ADP does offer.

We were pleased with TopSource’s security in our testing: the provider has ISO 27001 certification (like Moorepay) and suffered no data breaches in the last two years (unlike Advanced). On the features side, however, TopSource was let down by the fact that it doesn’t allow for custom report building, which makes its reporting less flexible and customisable than MHR’s.

Also, as with most providers we looked into, its pricing is bespoke, making it difficult to gauge whether this is the right provider for you. If you own a small business and are in a hurry to choose your next payroll provider, Iris Staffology and Payescape may be better choices since they advertise their prices.

Our methodology: How did we find the best payroll services?

Five researchers carried out in-depth research into payroll services according to a comparison framework designed by our research team leader. For each provider we’ve asked these questions:

• What accreditations and industry recognition do they have?
• How easily can your employees engage with and access the payroll process?
• How compliant are they with data security and privacy?
• Are they a scalable service that includes other HR functions should you grow to need them?

We’ve factored all these questions into our rating system and come out with a ranking of the best payroll services.

Important payroll dates recap

With important payroll deadlines on the horizon, you have to extra careful to submit your documentation correctly and in time. Payroll systems can certainly help you keep on top of them, but in any case, being aware of them certainly doesn’t hurt. To help you out, here’s a brief recap of the most important payroll dates.

• 5 April

– The 2022/2023 tax year ends.

– Deadline for payroll software update.

• 6 April

– The 2023/2024 tax year begins.

• 19 April

– Deadline for final 2022/2023 tax year reports submission.

• 22 April

– Deadline for the month 12 Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) payment.

• 31 May

– Deadline for your employees to receive their P60s (earning statements).

• 6 July

– Deadline for expenses and benefits report to the HRMC.

– Deadline for P11D and P11D(b) forms submission.

• 19 July

– Deadline for Class 1A National Insurance contributions on benefits in kind payment (if you’re not using digital systems to do so).

• 22 July

– Deadline for Class 1A National Insurance contributions on benefits in kind payment (if you’re using digital systems to do so).

Next steps

According to our deep-dive research, Moorepay is the best payroll company in the UK. Consultant-backed advice and custom reporting are among the features that made it top our independent deep-dive research into the payroll market.

If you’re still unsure and on the hunt for a payroll platform, you can use our free comparison tool to find providers suited to your business. Through it, you’ll be matched with trusted providers and they’ll then contact you with bespoke quotes.