How a UK Facilities Management Firm Achieved Full Payroll Audit Compliance

Business: Facilities management company, Birmingham, United Kingdom (European Union). 78 employees across contract sites, including maintenance staff, cleaning crews and site managers. Multiple clients with different site access and shift requirements. The problem: The company uses a UK payroll bureau for payroll runs. The internal HR team manages leave and overtime records. A 2025 internal audit identified incomplete documentation on overtime calculations for 14 employees and leave balance discrepancies for 22 employees across the prior 12 months. The auditor cited the absence of an auditable approval trail as the root cause. The HR director had 90 days to demonstrate corrective action before the external annual audit. The solution: Certiva Payroll Management and Workforce Control deployed within 3 weeks. Shift-based clock-in and clock-out replaced supervisor-submitted records. Leave requests go through the structured approval workflow with automatic balance tracking and supervisor sign-off recorded at each step. Overtime is calculated automatically from recorded hours. Every approval, exception and record change is logged with a timestamped audit trail. The payroll bureau receives a structured export with full supporting documentation attached. The results: The company passed the external annual audit with a clean report, which had not happened in the preceding two years. The auditor noted the structured approval trail and complete leave documentation as examples of improved controls. The HR director reduced the time spent on payroll preparation from 7 hours to under 2 hours per cycle. Leave disputes, which had averaged 4 per month, dropped to zero after month two of deployment. The company renewed for a second year and expanded to the inventory module for their asset management workflow. Key takeaway: Payroll compliance failures are almost always a documentation and process trail problem. The records exist. they are just not structured in a form that satisfies an auditor. Certiva creates that structure at the point of entry, not retroactively. Book a demo to see how Certiva's approval workflow builds the audit trail your payroll compliance requires. Related reading: Payroll workflow management for small businesses covers the structural fixes. Certiva vs. QuickBooks Time covers the most common alternative for UK and EU teams evaluating time and payroll workflow software.