ACCESS UK LTD

Access Education People & Payroll

Our payroll service team is a specialised and engaged extension to your school or Trust. We will work closely with you to provide an efficient, flexible, secure, and reliable service which is delivered by a dedicated and qualified payroll professional.

Features

• Fully managed payroll service
• Managed payroll service
• Processing only payroll
• Emergency Payroll Service
• HMRC recognised
• CIPP PAS accredited (Payroll Assurance Scheme)

Benefits

• Access to expertise of our dedicated CIPP PAS accredited team
• Pay employees on time, every time
• Greatly reduce and streamline in-house payroll processing administration
• Ensure maximum accuracy with expertly controlled payroll processing
• Remove the need to manage complex requirements and local legislation
• Take the burden out of pension returns and payroll processing

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at buyer.enablement@theaccessgroup.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 15

Service ID

816703259171628

Contact

Stacey Graham
0845 345 3300
buyer.enablement@theaccessgroup.com

About the service

• Service categories:
  • Applications
    • Enterprise resource management
      • Human capital management
        • Core Human Resources Applications
        • Talent Management Applications
      • Payroll management
        • Payroll management
• Multi cloud support: No

Service scope

• Software add-on or extension: Yes
• What software services is the service an extension to: Access Education People
• Cloud deployment model: Private cloud
• Service constraints: Maintenance windows as detailed above are minimal with the service so that we use all reasonable efforts to ensure that the SaaS Services are available for 99.70% of each calendar month.; ; As a true SaaS solution customisation is not available although the product can be configured to meet all standard set up requirements.
• System requirements:
  • Internet Access
  • Supported system for the data to be used in

User support

• Email or online ticketing support: Yes
• Support response times: This is dependent on Success Plan chosen initial response times are;; P1 - up to 1 hr; P2 - up to 2 hrs; P3 - up to 4 hrs; P4 - up to 1 Business Day
• User can manage status and priority of support tickets: Yes
• Online ticketing support accessibility: WCAG 2.2 AA
• Phone support: Yes
• Phone support availability: 9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
• Web chat support: Yes
• Web chat support availability: 9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
• AI chatbot: Yes
• Web chat support accessibility standard: WCAG 2.2 AA
• Web chat accessibility testing: N/A
• Onsite support: Yes, at extra cost
• Support levels: We provide 3 main support plans as detailed below. The Essential Plan The online service The Essential Plan is available to all Access customers as part of your license fee and provides you with easy-to-access online support for all your queries, facilitated via our Customer Success portal. The Standard Plan - Get answers faster. As a Standard Plan customer you benefit from faster response times and can access our support teams via telephone and live chat, as well as through our Customer Success portal. To help your team be more productive, you are provided with continued access to our e-learning content as well as a programme of Success webinars, designed to keep you up to date with new features and share best-practice advice and guidance. The Premier Plan - Boost productivity with direct access to the experts and achieve a higher return on investment. Our Premier Plan enables your team to achieve more and improve productivity through an ongoing relationship with your own designated Customer Success Manager. Your CSM will get to understand how you’re using the technology and will advise you on how to get more from it.
• Support available to third parties: Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

• Getting started: We use video technology to facilitate face to face contact, so you still get the hands-on benefit of working with an Access expert and our years of software deployment expertise. We have also invested in product eLearning, so your users can learn our products at their own pace.; ; Our remote-first approach means that you have regular, accessible communication with us to keep you on track at every step of your journey and that your software can be delivered flexibly to suit the needs of your organisation and employees.; ; All our FlightPath consultants and on-boarders are not only certified in our products, they are also trained and certified in our remote-first FlightPath implementation methodology, including training in effectively delivering remote customer projects.; ; Each FlightPath implementation programme from Access follows a well- defined journey with key milestones. These milestones represent – at a high level – the individual phases of your implementation journey. We use these milestones to help us both track and communicate progress towards successfully launching to your users. Our aim is to give you value from your investment as quickly and as fully as possible. Using our years of software deployment expertise, we have defined the FlightPath methodology.
• Service documentation: Yes
• Documentation formats: PDF
• Documentation accessibility standard: None or don’t know
• How the documentation is accessible: Access Group's onboarding and offboarding documentation is accessible through the Customer Success Portal (https://access-support.force.com/Support/s/), which provides 24/7 online access to comprehensive resources including a knowledge base with FAQs, product guides, e-learning content, on-demand webinar recordings, feature release updates, and training materials that can answer most day-to-day user questions. All users can register for portal access regardless of their Success Plan level (Essential, Standard, or Premier), with additional support available through online case submission for all customers, telephone support for Standard and Premier customers, and dedicated resources like Customer Success Managers and Lead Technical Support Engineers for Premier customers, ensuring documentation and guidance is readily available throughout the entire customer lifecycle from initial onboarding through ongoing system use and any eventual offboarding scenarios.
• End-of-contract data extraction: Our exit process is; The Renewals team receive the notification and undertake discussions with the client, the account manager and any other stakeholders. Once termination is confirmed, the “termination data requirements document” is sent to the client and a record created on the Offboarding register in line with internal processes. The status is set to “waiting customer”. On receipt of the offboarding document, Access Offboarding Review team will review the response, respond to any queries, annotate the record to reflect the customer requirements, upload the document and set the record to “not started” The Service Delivery team will pick up the ticket, arrange the return of data, decommission the system then they or hosting delete the data (production and backup unless “beyond access”(in which case it will be overwritten). Closure of the ticket triggers a confirmation to the customer that their data is deleted.
• End-of-contract process: Our exit process is; The Renewals team receive the notification and undertake discussions with the client, the account manager and any other stakeholders. Once termination is confirmed, the “termination data requirements document” is sent to the client and a record created on the Offboarding register in line with internal processes. The status is set to “waiting customer”. Note: In the event that a Customer does not return the document, they will be contacted again twice prior to termination and data will be deleted within 30 days from contract end as Access has no legal basis for processing from that point.

Using the service

• Web browser interface: No
• Application to install: No
• Designed for use on mobile devices: No
• Service interface: No
• User support accessibility: None or don’t know
• API: Yes
• What users can and can't do using the API: Open API for the service. details can be provided upon request.
• API documentation: No
• API sandbox or test environment: No
• Customisation available: Yes
• Description of customisation: There are 3 standard services that you can choose from.

Scaling

• Independence of resources: Access hosted servers are monitored ensuring that the service can expand sufficiently if required. In addition to this we use automated monitoring tools to alert us when demands on resource meet or exceed certain thresholds (CPU, RAM, I/O, disk usage etc). The infrastructure is sized to deliver comfortable capacity for even our peak service periods, day-today usage currently runs at 1/3 total capacity.

Analytics

• Service usage metrics: No

Supplier type

• Supplier type: Not a reseller

Staff security

• Staff security clearance: Conforms to BS7858:2019
• Government security clearance: Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS)

Asset protection

• Knowledge of data storage and processing locations: Yes
• Data storage and processing locations: United Kingdom
• User control over data storage and processing locations: No
• Datacentre security standards: Complies with a recognised standard (for example CSA CCM version 4.0)
• Penetration testing frequency: At least every 6 months
• Penetration testing approach: ‘IT Health Check’ performed by a CHECK service provider
• Protecting data at rest: Physical access control, complying with SSAE-18 / ISAE 3402
• Data sanitisation process: Yes
• Data sanitisation type: Explicit overwriting of storage before reallocation / Secure Erase
• Equipment disposal approach: Complying with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v4.0, CAS (Sanitisation) or ISO/IEC 27001

Data importing and exporting

• Data export approach: Standard excel reports are shared for customer use.
• Data export formats:
  • CSV
  • Other
• Other data export formats: Excel
• Data import formats:
  • CSV
  • Other

Data-in-transit protection

• Data protection between buyer and supplier networks: TLS (version 1.2 or above)
• Data protection within supplier network: TLS (version 1.2 or above)

Availability and resilience

• Guaranteed availability: We provide an uptime guarantee of 99.7% per calendar month. This does not include scheduled maintenance windows.
• Approach to resilience: This can be made available upon request.
• Outage reporting: Email alerts will be sent to customers.

Identity and authentication

• User authentication needed: Yes
• User authentication:
  • Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
  • Username or password
• Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels: Access to data is restricted depending on user roles and profiles.
• Access restriction testing frequency: At least every 6 months
• Management access authentication:
  • Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
  • Username or password

Audit information for users

• Access to user activity audit information: Users have access to real-time audit information
• How long user audit data is stored for: User-defined
• Access to supplier activity audit information: Users contact the support team to get audit information
• How long supplier audit data is stored for: User-defined
• How long system logs are stored for: User-defined

Security governance

• Named board-level person responsible for service security: Yes
• Software Security Code of Practice: Yes
• Security governance certified: Yes
• Security governance standards: ISO/IEC 27001
• Information security policies and processes: Access adhere to ISO27001 certification with a dedicated Information Security team working with the business to ensure we uphold our obligations, policies and procedures.

Operational security

• Configuration and change management standard: Complies with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v4.0 or SSAE-18 / ISAE 3402
• Configuration and change management approach: All change requests shall be logged on a standardised system in use by the team, such as JIRA (Development), FreshServe (CHS), Service Cloud – Customer Support platform. A documented audit trail, maintained at the business unit level, containing relevant information shall always be maintained. This should include change request documentation, authorisation and the outcome of the change. No individual should be able to effect changes to production information systems without following the change process from end to end full details can be requested via emails.
• Vulnerability management type: Complies with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v4.0 or SSAE-18 / ISAE 3402
• Vulnerability management approach: Patched and audited by our patch management system. All non-critical OS patches are applied within one calendar month of release, first into pre-production and then into production, as part of the scheduled maintenance window. AV Updates - Signatures are updated hourly. / Rules are reviewed at minimum every 3 months. Logs are reviewed at minimum every 3 months. Access staff responsible for the maintenance of our hosting services subscribe to industry newsletters, belong to various security forums and we additionally receive notifications from our vendors.
• Protective monitoring type: Complies with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v4.0 or SSAE-18 / ISAE 3402
• Protective monitoring approach: We have traffic monitoring and content based alerting which alerts on changes to the site and/or traffic flows implemented at infrastructure and application level. We proactively monitor third party suppliers (hardware, OS, application/web and database server software) vulnerability reporting and security fix availability. Any vulnerabilities found and fixes provided by third party suppliers are patched by our infrastructure team in a timescale appropriate for their level of severity. Any penetration test findings are fixed by Development in a timescale appropriate for their level of severity. Our infrastructure response is within 1 hour in the SLA period 8am-8pm Monday – Friday.
• Incident management type: Complies with a recognised standard, for example, CSA CCM v4.0 or ISO/IEC 27035:2011 or SSAE-18 / ISAE 3402
• Post-quantum cryptography secure: No
• Incident management approach: All incidents must be recorded on Access Group’s Incident Register (FreshService) in accordance with the Incident description as detailed in Definitions. An immediate assessment must be carried out, to determine whether the incident is a personal data breach and likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of the data subjects affected by the personal data and an incident report must be started. No evidence can be removed or anything deleted until screenshots/snapshots/ file information is recorded as this may hinder an investigation. – see collection of evidence section.

Secure development

• Approach to secure software development best practice: Independent review of processes (for example CESG CPA Build Standard, ISO/IEC 27034, ISO/IEC 27001 or CSA CCM v4.0)

Public sector networks

• Connection to public sector networks: No

Pricing

• Discount for educational organisations: No
• Free trial available: No

Discount percentage by annual call-off contract value (excluding VAT)

• Less than £250,000: 5%
• Between £250,000 and £500,000: 6%
• Between £500,001 and £1,000,000: 12%
• Between £1,000,001 and £2,500,000: 15%
• Between £2,500,001 and £5,000,000: 18%
• Over £5,000,001: 25%

Standards and certifications

• ISO/IEC 27001 certification: Yes
• ISO/IEC 27001 accredited by: Alcumus ISOQAR
• ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date: Saturday 4 January 2014
• What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover: Nothing is excluded from the standard certification.
• ISO 28000:2022 certification: No
• ISO 9001 certification: Yes
• ISO 9001 certification accredited by: BSI
• ISO 9001 accreditation date: Friday 1 September 2023
• What the ISO 9001 doesn’t cover: The scope covers the design, integration, maintenance and hosting of managed information systems and software applications, consultancy, user training and support for the Health, Education, Social Care and Local authorities. Excluding all other products that fall outside of this scope.
• Quality management systems (QMS): Yes
• CSA STAR certification: No
• PCI certification: No
• Cyber essentials: Yes
• Cyber Essentials Certificate Number: 88f162a5-ea3c-4f9a-83d5-42769c7d8459
• Cyber essentials plus: No
• Cyber Essentials Alternative: You do not have a current and valid Cyber Essentials Plus certificate, or will not have in place within 12 months of the date of award but have an IASME certified equivalent.
• Other security certifications: Yes
• Any other security certifications:
  • ISO 42001
  • ISO 27701

Social value

• Mission: Kick start economic growth:

  To secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 - with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off.

  Policy Outcome 1: Fair work: That offers fair wages and good working conditions. Help people get a job, stay in work, and progress in their careers, with good employment opportunities across the country. Notes: Where there is a large proportion of labour costs in the contract, commercial teams should consider MAC in Outcome 1 as a priority

  • Monitoring of employee engagement rates (by protected characteristic) and, where necessary, the development of actions to ensure all voices are heard across the diversity of the workforce
  • Employment contracts that reflect actual hours worked; steps taken to ensure employees understand their contracts and have the ability to review and adjust them if actual hours regularly exceed contracted hours
  • Activities that support an environment where staff are educated about, and feel empowered to, address their physical wellbeing
  • Activities that support an environment where staff are educated about and feel empowered to report and address bullying and harassment
  • Offer a pay and leave entitlement to all eligible staff who become kinship carers, ideally equivalent to statutory adoption pay and leave
  • Payment of more than the National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage (as appropriate) to the contract workforce
  • Monitoring and reporting of gender and ethnicity pay gaps and plans to address them where necessary
  • Entitlement to sick pay for the contract workforce, with provision in place for any staff who do not meet the earnings threshold for statutory sick pay, payment of sick pay from day one of absence and payment of staff on the contract workforce who are off sick a replacement income of 100% of their usual earnings for as long as possible
  • Understanding of the modern slavery risks and issues affecting the market, industry, sector or country (of origin or of source) relevant to the contract, and the workforce in the supplier’s own organisation and those of its key subcontractors

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at buyer.enablement@theaccessgroup.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.