Case studies

Sage plc is a market leader in accounting, financial, HR and payroll technology for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), with an annual revenue of over £2.1 billion in FY23, Sage software is used by millions of SMEs in the UK.

Across the UK, Sage’s finance, HR and payroll software is trusted to make work and money flow. Back in 2017, a strategic partnership between Personal Group and Sage resulted in the birth of Sage Employee Benefits, an employee engagement product designed for SMBs and integrated into Sage’s product portfolio.

Sage has been a valued Personal Group partner for more than seven years. A vast number of people in the UK are paid using a Sage Payroll solution, and almost 42% of businesses in the private sector use a Sage Payroll solution to pay their employees. Many of Sage’s customers typically do not access this type of employee benefits technology, which is usually available to larger enterprises. However, Sage Employee Benefits means that even the people employed by the smallest businesses can access an entire benefit offering, which they can access anytime, anywhere via an app or on their smartphones.

Sage Employee Benefits delivers benefits that small businesses and their employees want and need. They can access unrivalled access to savings and discounts across hundreds of retailers, salary sacrifice options, and wellbeing support. Based on Personal Group’s own proprietary platform named Hapi, Sage Employee Benefits is optimised for App delivery, which means that employees can access and manage their benefit services directly from their smartphones.

Personal Group’s Sage Employee Benefits teams provide everything from the onboarding of SMBs to bespoke marketing for Sage’s clients with a total of 33,838 activated users on the platform across 4,841 clients (as of March 2024).

The partnership and the app have been a great success and in particular the usage of retailer discounts – which has been increasingly valuable to employees during the cost-of-living crisis. In total, Sage clients have saved more than £1.1 million by using the benefit. Going forward, Sage and Personal Group plans to further improve the customer journey of the app to drive even more value in its Reward and Recognition programme.