Worst Umbrella Company - Parasol

**eek** · 4 February 2022, 13:24

Um have you seen Parasol Umbrella seem to have disappeared today - Contractor UK Bulletin Board

or even Parasol expects customer service to suffer for another two weeks (contractoruk.com)

or any of the emails they are supposed to have sent people regarding the issues they are experiencing having been "hacked"

**digitalscience** · 4 February 2022, 13:30

Yes I have seen those emails although that doesn't mean you disappear on your customers. That is my point. Not that they have been hacked. Sending out mass emails about the fact they they have IT issues is not customer service.

**WTFH** · 4 February 2022, 13:40

Originally posted by digitalscience View Post

No Customer Service, no phone contacts, no communication whatsoever from this company. To top it off - I have not been paid for my December contract. No apologies or anything. Infact noone has been in touch - they have disappeared. PLEASE DO NOT USE THEM

Originally posted by digitalscience View Post

Yes I have seen those emails ... Sending out mass emails about the fact they they have IT issues is not customer service.

OK, so you have had emails from them, but you're also saying you haven't.

Yes, it's not good that the group has been hacked and a lot of people are in the same boat.

**eek** · 4 February 2022, 13:41

Originally posted by digitalscience View Post

Yes I have seen those emails although that doesn't mean you disappear on your customers. That is my point. Not that they have been hacked. Sending out mass emails about the fact they they have IT issues is not customer service.

Their work load has probably tripled compared to before and it's a lot better to get people paid than deal with them over the phone.

Have you tried their webchat which supposedly is working (and does in theory allow more people to be processed per hour than handling phone calls).

**northernladuk** · 4 February 2022, 14:08

Originally posted by digitalscience View Post

Yes I have seen those emails although that doesn't mean you disappear on your customers. That is my point. Not that they have been hacked. Sending out mass emails about the fact they they have IT issues is not customer service.

Gotta say it does sound like you are being a bit harsh. They are in the middle of potentially the worst issue they've ever had and a proper nightmare for any business. It's a big ask to hold them to customer service levels before when they are scrabbling to save their business.

I get you are frustrated. Everyone involved is but 'worst' and don't use seem a little out of order.

**gizzmo** · 4 February 2022, 18:53

Have to say I do feel for them, I found that they did reply to my e-mails albeit after 3-4 days - and explained what they were doing to progress my payments etc. I have today finally had my December pay which was due last week, paid via normal payroll and with usual deductions. I had opted not to have an interim payment but that was my choice, keeps it cleaner for me.

**Wilf** · 4 February 2022, 23:41

I got an (automated) email from them today, so they must be working through the backlog. I do feel sorry for the poor sods working there, it must be awful.

Wrath should be directed at the criminals who carried out the ransomware attack (allegedly) rather than the poor workers who are trying to sort this mess out and the sysadmin(s) who put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

**pacontracting** · 7 February 2022, 07:38

I have complete sympathy for the customer services team, who were polite in all correspondence, but essentially had their hands tied behind their back and could do nothing of use.

Official communication was very poor - it is always better to tell the truth up front, rather than being economic with it; it will come out eventually.

I have no sympathy for the management who oversaw poor IT security practices to allow them to be affected to this level in the first place, and poor governance such that business continuity was critically affected. A two week+ recovery time is not acceptable for a critical system like this. I doubt they'd even set a recovery time objective for it let alone thought about the business impact of an outage. Unfortunately, in an unregulated industry, some people may say it's cheaper to take it on the nose than pay to mitigate it in the first place.

So the original poster was correct - shambles of a company but propped up by decent front line workers, doing the best they could in the environment that management provided for them.

**Walt42** · 2 March 2022, 18:32

I've been with Parasol since Novemeber. They were alright until they were hacked. But, I'm confused about the 'employment costs'. They've given me a breakdown with the calculation but I don't understand the calculation, which looks weird to me.

They've got:

(invoice value - margin - pension auto enrolment - weekly NI allowance) * (14.3 / 114.3) + 0.75

They explained they're calculating 14.3%, which is the sum of the 13.8% employers NI + 0.5% apprenticeship levy. Then they're adding 75p to adjust the apprenticeship levy which they calculated after the weekly NI allowance was deducted. Which results in the weird (14.3 / 114.3) + 0.75 calculation.

So, how does 14.3 / 114.3 calculate 14.3%? Is my basic maths flawed? That looks like 12.5% to me. It looks like the cost is too low, which I imagine no one will complain about. I prefer their amount but I'd rather be accurate. What am I doing wrong?

Worst Umbrella Company - Parasol