A little about me. Ten (or so) years ago, I knew nothing about payroll or workplace pensions. My background was in the financial markets and in particular around electronic trading of equities (aka shares). After 13 years at the financial technology and news giant Reuters (now part of London Stock Exchange Group), I was lucky enough to launch and eventually sell a software business to a quoted Danish company, SimCorp. I went on to work for them in Copenhagen for 4 years but eventually got the itch to build something new.

Leaving SimCorp at the end of 2009, I built a new business in an adjacent field and came to count big names like Morgan Stanley and the London Stock Exchange amongst my customers. But sadly in 2011, my wife of 25 years was diagnosed of terminal breast cancer and she passed away in 2012. Understandably, I was lost and stepped away from business for over a year, moving to an island off the coast of Croatia, pretty much a retiree.

Retirement didn’t completely agree with me though. Living by the seaside on the beautiful Dalmatian coast was idyllic, but I soon became bored. I decided to look for a part-time job. In the end I took a sweat-equity CTO role at Husky, a fledgling start-up in the UK workplace pensions space. It was there that I learned the vagaries of UK Auto-Enrolment. Later, around 2020, when Husky decided to launch an integrated payroll service, it was my job to get it off the ground.

Our strategy was to partner with a small number of payroll bureaus to bootstrap the service. After a few false starts, we settled on one main partner, Coates Business Services, and I was particularly lucky to be mentored by one of their principals, Matthew Coates, a consummate payroll professional (as well as as seasoned accountant). Under Matthew’s watchful eye, I was soon running payrolls for a range of SMEs, from 2 to 200 staff, including some household names (well, in tech circles, that is).

In 2022, faced with some difficult choices at the business, I opted to leave Husky and start out again on my own. I decided to write my own payroll solution and had to get to grips with how software should calculate income tax, National Insurance, pensions and the like. In doing so, I built up a broad and deep set of knowledge about payroll and workplace pension engineering, and this blog is an attempt to capture some of that knowledge and share it with those that come after me.

I hope you find it useful.