Guildhall School of Music & Drama

The Guildhall School of Music and Drama relies on part-time staff to teach their specialist music and drama curriculum. The school transitioned their part-time staff to a PAYE payroll system and automated their processes with VT2000 – which they have been using since 2011.

The school previously used a manual excel spreadsheet to record the staff pay rates and payroll, which was used in silo by different functions. This made it difficult for the payroll team to accurately track staff payments due to a lack of visibility and clarity around the figures in the spreadsheet.

This manual system did not record the number of teaching sessions and made it challenging to resolve queries about payment effectively. The school needed a central, integrated system that all departments, teachers and the payroll team could access to better manage their part-time staff.

After a recommendation from another university, the school switched to VT2000 to transform their payroll system. Each teaching department can set the teaching hours for the year in equal instalments, which can be flexibly accessed using VT2000 to let teachers know their contracted hours.

The school’s central spreadsheet of data is updated regularly by each department and checked by the finance team before being automatically uploaded to VT2000. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and ensures that any changes to the data are incorporated.

VT2000 allows teams to clearly see the history of where changes to the payroll or scheduling data have been made by departments, finance and payroll teams. This vastly minimises the risk of error and any mistakes in the data can be identified and resolved easily.

Using VT2000 teachers can view their pay statements, allowing for better pay transparency across the organisation. Being able to better record payments has made the school’s auditing systems more robust.

• Streamlined workflow processes between departments, finance and payroll teams
• Greater pay transparency for teachers and payroll teams
• Greater control of budgets by teaching departments
• Enhanced communication with teachers around their pay
• Reduces risk of error in payments
• Elimination of manual data entry

“VT2000 has greatly benefitted the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and helped us transform our staff scheduling and payroll workflow. VT2000 is an incredibly nimble system; we pay our staff in equal instalments throughout the year as opposed to staff claiming for their pay. VT2000 has been customised to suit our processes, whilst other systems are set up for claim-based processes only. If we ever wanted to change to a claim-based payment process, we are reassured by the fact that VT2000 can also support this transition” – Laura Humphreys, Payroll Administration Manager, Guildhall School of Music and Drama