As the pace of change in the automatic enrolment market starts to increase dramatically (starting in early 2016 they’ll be tens of thousands of employers each and every month who need to comply) we’re also busy at AE in a Box making changes which are all designed to make our platform an increasingly useful tool both to help employers as they approach their staging date and beyond.

Increasingly the improvements we make don’t come from the AE in a Box team but instead come from the feedback we continue to receive from both our partner and employer users.

It’s interesting. When you build a platform like AE in a Box you spend a decent amount of time planning, developing and then launching. You’re immensely proud, along with your team, with what you’ve built… and then something happens.

You start receiving user feedback.

Feedback like “We’re having a problem with this”, “This needs to be clearer” or “It would be really useful if you added this function…”

This is the stage when whilst you’re proud of what you’ve built you decide how you’re going to ensure the service you provide will continue to evolve to both the current and future needs of your users.

The reality is that whilst we initially developed AE in a Box and ultimately decided how it’s going to develop, the best ideas about how AE in a Box should evolve have been received, will continue to come and hopefully will be revived by the bucketload in the future from our partner, introducer and employer users (on other words many of you)

So, you may ask, what changes have we made?

Audit trail functionality

We had an incredibly good piece of feedback from one of our partners who suggested that AE in a Box as a tool to help employers comply with automatic enrolment hsould have a clear way to record an employers journey to compliance and then beyond.

Previously AE in a Box tracked the dates and times each ‘task’ was completed but this wasn’t visible to AE in a Box users. Also we retained no record of who completed what task.

Now, all tasks show when they were completed and we now record on each task who competed them. You can see how this works below…

Whilst this is a simple change it allows both employers and the professionals who work with them to have a clear picture of who’s completed specific tasks and as well as full transparency on that information.

A simple change but one our users are telling us is helping massively by keeping track of who completed tasks and when.

What’s in a name

Some of the tools available on AE in a Box were named by the automatic enrolment ‘geeks’ who designed AE in a Box (that includes me). However now the systems being actively used in the real world we’re finding that some of the names we use to explain these tools had to change to reflect what they actually do in simpler language our users find straightforward.

Therefore instead of “certification calculator” we decided that “contributions calculator” was a more appropriate name… The tool does calculate contributions after all!

Also in a world where more and more employers are now using their existing payroll software to help them with the payroll obligations under the process we change the name of the “middleware selector” to the “payroll compatibility tool”.

Again, simple changes but one designed to continue to make AE in a box as intuitive to use as possible.

Smooth Sailing

We’ve also been doing a bit of work around making using AE in a box smoother sailing. This means that we’ve been focusing on the experiences of our users and making the process of both completing tasks and using the tools on AE in a Box as far smoother process.

So, as we quickly approach the period in which tens of thousands of employers need to comply each and every month we’re constantly making changes to ensure we deliver a solution whihc is ready to help…

Please feel free to let us know what you think.