Each week we receive a great many queries from umbrella company employees who want to check if they are getting paid. For the vast majority, there was no reason to doubt that they would be paid, they were just anxious about it and wanted us to confirm. In fact, we know there is generally a lot of perceived uncertainty surrounding umbrella company pay and, in this article, we want to address that.

No-one wants to be uncertain about whether they will be paid. For most of us, not getting paid when we expect to can be a disaster, affecting almost every aspect of our lives. We understand why you’d want to check if you’re uncertain, and we’re more than happy to take your call; it’s the uncertainty that we want to change. We know how difficult it can be and we don’t want our employees to have to deal with it.

You wouldn’t chase a conventional employer

If you’ve ever been a conventional employee, you’ll probably remember just trusting that the system would work. It’s unlikely that you called the payroll department every week to make sure you were on the list to be paid. It’s also likely that payroll was a small part of what your employer did, and yet you trusted them to get it right. Our point is that if you find yourself chasing your payments every week, something is going wrong. It’s not a normal thing that an employee should have to do.

Umbrella pay is slightly different, in that there are more companies involved and more events in the chain, but if you’ve chosen a good umbrella company they will be used to this environment, and they can be trusted every bit as much as a conventional employer.

Your umbrella company are payroll experts

Assuming you’ve chosen a compliant, established umbrella company, they will be very good at running payroll. The process of receiving information from the agency or client and making payment to you through their payroll system may seem to you to involve a lot of moving parts, but they’ve done it for thousands of contractors every day for many years and to them it isn’t complex.

For example, Orange Genie’s payroll system is robust and flexible enough for our expert and highly qualified payroll team to deal quickly and easily with almost any situation. Errors are vanishingly rare, and almost never result in a late payment. We can confidently state that as long as you follow the correct timesheet process as explained to you by us, your agency and/or your client, you absolutely will be paid as expected.

If you’re usually paid on Friday, you’re going to be paid on Friday

We know that you want your pay to be predictable, so you can get on with other things and plan your life without worrying about it. This is why we’ve designed our systems and processes specifically to ensure that you’ll know when you’ll be paid.

For example, if you’re usually paid on Friday, you worked as normal last week and you’ve submitted your timesheets like you usually do, we can guarantee that you will be paid as expected this Friday. There’s no question about it, you don’t need to worry, and you don’t need to call us to check.

If something did go wrong…

As we’ve said, the umbrella payment process is extremely robust and well tested, so we’re very confident that there will be no delays at our end. However, if you’re aware of an issue that might delay your payment, for example if you haven’t been able to get your timesheet signed off by the client in time, we will obviously do everything we can to prevent any delay. In these cases, the sooner we know the more we can do, so please contact our team as soon as possible.

If you’re not with us yet and have questions about this issue, or if we can help in any way, please contact our expert team on 01296 468 483 or email info@orangegenie.com.