Irwell Payroll Services / BG-Demo – Discovery
Callcompleted
Irwell Payroll Services · 1 Jul 2024 14:30
Priya Raman ran discovery with Keith Partington and Dawn Hindle. Staff search Xero, a payroll database, Zendesk and a CRM by hand. Keith wants to handle more clients without hiring and agreed to see a demo on their own data.
What was said
What this says
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Priya Raman ran discovery with Keith Partington and Dawn Hindle. Staff search Xero, a payroll database, Zendesk and a CRM by hand. Keith wants to handle more clients without hiring and agreed to see a demo on their own data.
What happened: Priya Raman ran a discovery call with managing director Keith Partington and operations manager Dawn Hindle on 1 Jul 2024. They described how staff answer client queries by hopping between systems.
Customer view: Dawn called the manual lookup a nightmare, and Keith said faster answers would let them handle more clients without hiring more people. About fifteen people do this searching.
Commercial: The four named systems match the 4 connector hard limit on Starter, and client HR files and emails could push the need beyond that. Fifteen people also sits at the Starter soft user limit, so Starter or Growth needs scoping.
Watch: Keith asked to attend the demo himself, which puts the decision-maker in the room. Priya committed to a demo in late July on their own data.
Themes
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Who was there
BG-Demo
Them
Follow-up
Next steps
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Priya Raman books a demo for late July on Irwell's own payroll and client data across all four systems.
- Priya confirms that Keith Partington and Dawn Hindle both attend the demo.
- Priya clarifies with Dawn which documents and email sources are in scope before choosing a tier.
Risks
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Four main systems plus client HR files and emails could exceed the 4 connector hard limit on Starter.
- The demo is only booked for late July, so momentum depends on Priya Raman holding the date.
Opportunities
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Growth tier (8 connectors, 40 users) may fit better if documents and emails are in scope.
- Keith links the value to handling more clients without hiring, which gives a clear business case to build on.
Transcript
Priya RamanMorning Keith, morning Dawn, thanks for the time. So I'm really curious to understand your data challenge at the moment. Walk me through what's keeping you up at night.
Keith PartingtonWell, we're processing payroll for hundreds of employers now, and the amount of data we're working with is, it's a lot. We've got payroll records, we've got HR data from clients, we've got complaints about errors. It's all over the place.- Priya RamanRight. And when something goes wrong, when a client calls in about a payment issue, what does that look like? How do you currently find the answer?
Dawn HindleIt's manual. Someone takes the call, they need to look into the payroll system, the HR data, the emails about that client, their payment records. It's a nightmare, honestly. Takes time and it's easy to miss something.- Priya RamanSo you've got your payroll system, HR systems, and you're managing it all from multiple screens. That's pretty common. What systems do you actually use? Give me the full stack.
- Keith PartingtonWe're on Xero for accounting, we've got our own payroll database, we use Zendesk for tickets, we've got a CRM for client management. And that's before we're talking about all the HR files our clients send us.
- Priya RamanOK so there's Xero, the payroll database, Zendesk, the CRM, four main systems and probably lots of documents and emails. Is there any way to search across all of that right now, or does every question mean hopping around?
- Dawn HindleHopping around. That's exactly it. There's no single place to go and find, like, 'show me all issues for this client in the last month', you have to know where to look.
- Priya RamanAnd how many people are doing this? Like, how big's your ops team that needs to do this searching?
- Dawn HindleThere's about fifteen of us. Ashleigh's the systems lead, then we've got payroll staff, and a couple of people handling client issues.
- Priya RamanRight. So if we could shrink the time to get an answer from, say, twenty minutes down to thirty seconds, what would that mean for your team?
- Keith PartingtonIt would mean we could handle more clients without hiring more people, to be honest. And the error rate would probably come down too.
- Priya RamanOK. So to keep momentum here, what I'd like to do is come back with a demo where you can see the brain working on your actual payroll and client data. We'd show you querying across all four of those systems at once. How does that sound?
- Dawn HindleYeah, that'd be really helpful. I'd like to see what a proper query looks like.
- Priya RamanPerfect. And Keith, would you want to see that demo too, or should I just loop in Dawn and you can check in after?
- Keith PartingtonProbably best if I see it. I need to understand what we're getting into.
- Priya RamanGreat. I'll get something in the diary for late July and we can walk through it then. Leave that with me. Cheers, both.