Aussie HR firm moves into managed payroll services

Firm nets Harvey Norman as a customer.

Australian-owned human resource solutions developer - Neller - has acquired Miller Payroll Bureau to help it enter the managed services business.

Started about 33 years ago, Neller, provides workforce management solutions for medium to large organisations in Australia and New Zealand.  Its product - Preceda on Demand - is a web based workforce management product.

David Page, managing director at Neller said that Sydney-based Miller Payroll Bureau (MPB) has been providing payroll services to a number of companies including Harvey Norman's franchisee network. 

Page said the company has also formed a new offshoot, Neller Employmer Services (NES), to incorporate MPB.

"In total, NES will have immediate responsibility for delivering payroll services to over 13,000 employees," he said.

Page claimed trends globally - exacerbated by the global financial crisis - indicate that business process outsourcing (BPO) for payroll and HR will further increase in popularity.

"In the past we have often been asked by our clients whether [BPO] is a service we would offer," said Page. "The MPB acquisition is the first of a number of acquisitions in this space that we are working on and I am confident there will be others we can conclude over the coming months."

He believed rather than an "old-fashioned bureau" styled payroll service, clients want complete access to self-servicing HR and reporting.

"The NES payroll managed service offering leverages an on-demand (SaaS) deployment model and the integrated people management functionality of Neller's Preceda On Demand solution," said Page.

He said negotiations took three to four months to complete, before Neller bought MPB for an undisclosed sum.

Page said Neller offered jobs to most of MPB's 14 employees and eight have chosen to move across to the new business.