Clifton Asset Management

Growth without extra resource

Clifton Asset Management Ltd replaced two disconnected systems with Moorepay’s HR and Payroll Software, consisting initially of nine separate payrolls (since consolidated into 5) and absorbing almost 50% headcount growth without needing to expand their processing team.

About the company

Clifton Asset Management Ltd provides specialist financial services to businesses and individuals across the UK, with Head Office being just South of Bristol where the group has been based for more than twenty years and satellite offices across England, Wales and Scotland. It completed a private equity buyout in February 2025 and has been acquiring firms on a regular basis since.

The problem: two systems that had grown up separately

Clifton had run payroll on the same platform since 2011 and kept HR on a separate subscription service. The two had never been connected, and there had never been a reason to look at combining them. There were also concerns around the Hardware requirements to meet the requirement of SQL based systems and the resilience and connectivity risks associated with this.

“We’d been aware for some time that the HR and payroll systems weren’t in any way, shape or form connected,” says Tom Chambers, Group Financial Controller with twenty-six years in the business. The HR support they was also starting to lag behind what was required as the business was and continues to grow.

Any information relevant to both HR and payroll had to be entered twice. Real Time Information filings were manual. Tax codes and student loan notices meant a monthly trip to HMRC. Payslips were emailed out, so every lost one came back as a request. And local software meant updates – and disruption – happened every few months.

HR and payroll held separately, with no link between them
Manual RTI filings and monthly tax code retrieval
Local software requiring updates every few months

Making the choice

Clifton’s leadership team made the decision, and one requirement mattered more to Tom than anything on a feature list.

Clifton is a relatively complex business with a lot of cost centring, and the payroll had to build journals that its accounts package would accept.

“For me, that was a big consideration… is your software going to be up to what we want to do?” he says. “Actually, the great thing though is it was like a massive tick.”

Being web-based was the other draw. “It meant we’re not managing hardware infrastructure for the software anymore, which is really, really good.”

The templates were thorough, they were very well thought out.”

Tom Chambers | Group Financial Controller

The implementation process

The first payrolls to move a newly acquired and newly formed company, brought across in March 2025 part-way through the tax year. Clifton had never migrated a payroll mid-year before. The rest of the business followed in April on clean balances.

“I had a really good contact at Moorepay who helped me an enormous amount with that,” says Tom. “I couldn’t have done it without them, frankly.”

Putting the two systems side by side also surfaced differences nobody had spotted. “There were some brilliant tools there which would did data validation checks on the template we had assembled which actually highlighted some differences between our old payroll and HR records” he says. “For example, HR might have updated someone’s working hours and we’d never heard, so payroll was different. We were able to get everything beautifully aligned, which was excellent.” Going forward, due to the system links, this should never happen again.

Enjoying the results

Clifton has kept acquiring, but has been able to consolidate the original nine payrolls in five, albeit larger ones. Adding a newly acquired firm is now a short administrative job rather than a project.

“It’s very easy for me to go in, add the numerical value we’ve given it, pop a name in and then just attach staff to it through drop downs,” says Tom. “That’s really great.”

Headcount has risen just as quickly, from around 120 at migration to about 190 today, with some months bringing in fourteen new starters at once. Tom’s own assessment is that the extra volume has been absorbed with no extra resource.

At no point has that felt really onerous. There have been months we’ve had 14 new staff and that’s quite a few people. So to be able to go through and just do that has been really nice.”

Tom Chambers | Group Financial Controller

The clearest test came at the annual salary review. Nearly a hundred changes went through in a single month, 77 of them salary increases raised in HR and expected to reach payroll without being retyped. Five needed a call to support due to oddities. The rest did not.

“Everything else went through like clockwork, which is a pretty robust test of it,” says Tom.

Day to day, the main visible difference is less administration. “I don’t have to manually do all the RTI filings every month, I don’t have to bring the tax codes and student loan or post-graduate loan changed in” he says. “It’s made the process less fragmented because I’m not having to go off to a load of other places to do things. And HMRC is a great example, you know, going in every month, checking tax codes, student loan notices.”

Moving to a hosted platform removed a category of work and a category of worry at once. “We don’t have to do software updates every couple of months, all the issues that you get around them. It’s really nice that that’s all gone.” In more than a year, Tom cannot recall a single occasion when the system was unavailable.

Smaller irritations went with it. Payslips are no longer emailed, so nobody asks him to resend four months of them. “They’re all just sat in the documents folder now. It’s all those silly little things. They still add up, don’t they?”

On the HR side, the team records a pay increase once and it flows through to payroll with a full audit history behind it. “Stuff like that’s great,” says Tom.

Nine payrolls consolidated into five
Almost 50% headcount growth absorbed with no extra resource
RTI filings, tax code retrieval and software updates removed

The support teams have been brilliant, actually. They’ve been really, really helpful all the way through and continue to be.”

Tom Chambers | Group Financial Controller

Final thoughts on using Moorepay

When asked what he would miss if the system vanished tomorrow, Tom names three things rather than one:

The integration between HR and payroll
The automation of RTI and tax codes through the HMRC watermark service
How quickly he can sort out anything to do with the journals

“I don’t think I’ve got one favourite thing about it, but I think those are the things that make my life easier,” he says. “Those are three things that have been noticeable improvements with what we have now over what we had before.”

The integration between the two systems does work pretty well. I think that’s great, because it saves work and it avoids errors, frankly.”

Tom Chambers | Group Financial Controller

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