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A conversation with Sargent-Disc

Family-run business Sargent-Disc was established in 1986 and has since gone on to become one of the best-known specialists in providing payroll, accounting and software services for the entertainment industries.

Having recently won the Specialist Payroll Provider Award at the National Payroll World Awards in London we decided to have a chat with one of the company's directors, Laurence Sargent, about the challenges and achievements involved in working in this field.

 

Laurence Sargent
 

As we congratulated Laurence on the win, we wondered how hard it is for a payroll provider to work within the parameters of the very creative entertainment industry.
 

Working with creatives

After acknowledging their delight with their clients' support and the commitment of the team, he went on explain that experience is everything:  "The team has over a hundred years of collective film and television production experience and are part of the production community.

"We take great pleasure and pride in eliminating the headache of production payroll to enable producers to concentrate on delivering their creative vision to the screen and global audiences.

"Production is a wonderfully collaborative process which brings physical production skills together with the creative glue to produce fantastic feature films and television programmes."
 

Past and future challenges

We next turned to the question of the company's biggest challenge over the last year, to which Laurence replied:  "Creating the Sargent-Disc Auto Enrolment solution to support our corporate and production payroll clients to be compliant with the new legislation. It is a seamless process integrated with our payroll service and can assess contributions, issue notices and make payments."

What about the entertainment industry as a whole? Could he foresee some of the challenges ahead there, for example how auto-enrolment is affecting production companies, studios and even freelancers?

The answer was definitive: "The Department of Work and Pensions' auto-enrolment legislation has and will continue to have a massive impact. Many large established companies have already staged, but the majority of production companies are SME's [small and medium-sized enterprises] and will stage over the next sixteen months .

"Staging has a big impact on small companies - the process requires them to have identified the pension provider for their employees well in advance, whether staff or freelance, and to be responsible for delivering a multitude of administrative tasks such as calculation of contributions, issuing of notices, managing the 'opt in' and 'opt out' process to mention just a few. This extra layer of work is difficult for SME's to resource.

"The challenge relating to freelancers is that companies are legally obligated to auto-enrol all eligible workers whether staff or those employed on Schedule D freelance contracts - a layer of administration neither the company or freelancer usually wants."
 

Client services

When we asked about the tailored solutions currently on offer for the industry, Laurence was clear about the current offerings to clients.

"We strive to improve our sup

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