Iris News

Our IRIS Cascade team have been busy these last few months, working on a number of exciting software updates and new features. In our latest Cascade webinar, the product team walked through what we’ve delivered and how it’ll help customers. In this blog, we’ve rounded up the recent updates across four key areas: HR, payroll, API and support. Over the past few months, we’ve shipped a number of HR improvements to IRIS Cascade, in addition to a new, larger feature that customers have been asking for.

1 in 6 UK workers paid via IRIS 300,000+ employers use IRIS HCM 1M+ employeesmanaged via IRIS Transform the employee lifecycle One connected platform for the entire employee lifecycle Great businesses are built by great employees. But managing your people is complex, especially if your systems are disconnected. Integrated HR and payroll software connects every stage of the employee lifecycle in one place.

This year might feel like The Big Event when it comes to Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, but it’s a practice run. The volume of work is about to go up significantly. Starting next year, more clients will need your help when it comes to Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (MTD for IT). That’s because the threshold will move to include individuals earning more than £30,000 from sole trader or landlord income (or a combination of both).

Have you swapped your umbrella for sun cream? It must be summer! Well, that can only mean one thing: it’s time for the Staffology Payroll summer software update. In this blog, we’ve showcased some of the great new features now available in Staffology Payroll. Staffology Payroll now gives you more control over how enhanced holiday pay is applied. Until now, average holiday pay has always been calculated in hours, but this latest update adds the ability to calculate it on a daily basis.

IRIS Elements continues to become more powerful – with this quarter’s update delivering a leap in AI functionality and improvements to accounts production. Let’s look in detail at the great things our engineers have delivered over the last couple of months. At the end, we’ll also have a quick FAQ – answering the biggest questions our community has. IRIS Elements now includes two new AI tax features – improved anomaly detection and AI document import.

Staying on top of HR compliance can feel like a full-time job in itself. This year especially, many of us are feeling the pressure, with the first wave of the Employment Rights Act 2025 now in play and more due later this year and in 2027. For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the pressure is exceptionally high as most don’t have big teams or in-house experts to help manage the change. If you’re struggling, know that you’re not alone.

How do you think you’re perceived in your business? There’s no doubt that payroll is essential to maintaining a happy and engaged workforce. If people don’t get paid, they don’t work. Now while payroll has historically been viewed as a back-office function, simply there to ensure staff are paid correctly and on time, something is shifting. More and more payroll professionals are taking on increasingly strategic roles, backed by their payroll and HR data analytics.

No accountant ever said, “a change is as good as a rest” and kept a straight face. That’s because change has become an unstoppable force in accountancy, and it’s one to be reckoned with. On legislation alone, there have been about 15 upheavals across the last two decades – whether we’re talking about matters directly linked to accounting, like MTD, or indirect but equally pressing changes, like GDPR. Meanwhile, when it comes to tech, the world’s barely recognisable compared to 20 years ago.

If you run payroll for a school or trust, you already know it’s not like payroll anywhere else. Multiple posts, pay spines, term-time contracts, backdated pay, TPS, LGPS, sometimes private pension funds running side by side – get any one of them wrong and it’s a member of staff who feels it first, especially at retirement. But payroll errors don’t stop there.

Profitability blind spots thrive in accounting firms. While you’re busy focusing on your clients, they take root and grow. This is a problem. The longer they’re left, the more money your firm loses. They are near impossible to spot manually; no firm ever has enough staff to dig them out. In recent years, new priorities have constantly got in the way. COVID kicked things off, followed by Making Tax Digital for Accounting Tax (MTD for IT) – the biggest transformation in tax for three decades.