A PEO arrangement takes the payroll and the employment administration off you: contracts, notices, statutory payments, pension duties and records. You carry on directing the work and the people doing it.
Managed payroll stops at the pay run. PEO takes on the employment administration around it too, which in most small businesses has no natural home and ends up with whoever cannot refuse it. The commercial relationship and the direction of the work stay with you. What moves is the paperwork: the right contract, the right notice period, statutory pay calculated properly and the records to prove it.
Under a PEO arrangement we handle:
You employ. We process the pay run and file. The employment administration stays with you.
You employ and direct the work. We process the pay run and carry the statutory employment administration with it.
We employ through our own entity and carry the employer obligations. You direct the work. Used where you have no entity in the country.
Most clients use more than one of these across different parts of the workforce. They are not competing products.
Past the point where the founder can handle employment paperwork personally, but not yet at the size where a dedicated HR hire is justified. The gap where most compliance problems start.
A handful of UK staff reporting to a parent abroad, where nobody in the group knows what a written statement of particulars is or when statutory sick pay starts.
Where the volume of employment administration around placed workers has outgrown the back office and is starting to slow down the placements themselves.
The phrase gets used, but UK law has no concept of co-employment in the way the United States does. What actually happens here is a division of labour: the employment relationship sits in one place, and the administration that goes with it sits with us. We set out in writing which duties we are carrying and which remain yours, because an arrangement described loosely is one nobody can rely on when it matters.
Where the employment sits. Under PEO the workforce is generally employed by you and we run the payroll and statutory administration alongside you. Under EOR we become the legal employer through our own entity, which is what you need when you have no entity in the country concerned. If you have a UK company and want the admin gone, PEO. If you have no company where the person works, EOR.
Not entirely, and be wary of anyone who says it does. Good administration removes a great deal of risk through correct contracts, proper notices, deadlines met and records kept. But decisions about who is hired, how they are managed and whether they are dismissed remain yours, and so does the consequence of those decisions. We make sure the process around them is right.
You do, for anything about the work itself. We deal with the administrative traffic: payslip queries, tax code questions, holiday balances, statutory payment calculations, pension enquiries and the paperwork around joining and leaving. It takes the routine volume off your managers without putting a stranger between them and their teams.
Yes, and it is common. Some clients put a single site, a new division or a particular category of worker under a PEO arrangement while the rest stays on ordinary managed payroll. The reporting is consolidated either way, so your finance team still sees one payroll picture.
PEO, EOR or plain managed payroll. Describe the workforce and we will tell you which one fits, including when the answer is the cheapest of the three.