The business
Brickstone Construction are specialists in traditional brickwork, blockwork, stonework, GRC panels, glazed terracotta and prefabricated brick systems. FIRAS accredited, and based in Bedfordshire.
Their work speaks for the standard: Wood Wharf for Canary Wharf Construction, Westgate Oxford and Oxford University for Laing O'Rourke, Exchange Square and One Centenary Way for Sir Robert McAlpine, Snow Hill Wharf for Berkeley, Unity & Armouries for Dandara.
“We've put a simple platform in place to process payments, and the lads can see every timesheet and every payment on their phone. Keeping the team happy makes our lives so much easier.”
Simple to run
Brickstone use Vyce for payments and nothing else, which is rather the point. It doesn't require you to replace everything to be worth having.
Subcontractors are verified with HMRC before they're paid, deductions apply at the rate HMRC returns, payments run on Brickstone's instruction, and the monthly CIS300 files from the payment data already in the system.
The bit the workforce notices
Every person Brickstone pay can see their own timesheets and every payment they've had, on their phone, whenever they want.
That sounds like a small thing. It isn't. Most of the friction in paying a subcontract workforce isn't the payment, it's the questions around it — what did I work, what was deducted, where's my statement, can you send it again.
When people can answer those themselves, the office stops fielding them.
What it means
A workforce that can see its own numbers is a workforce that trusts the process. For a business running specialist packages for tier-one contractors, that's worth more than the admin time it saves — though it saves that too.