Five ways to engage

Three situations account for most first conversations. Each one has a first rung.

Read: sizing the work, review, diagnostic or remediation programme

Rung 0. Free, self-serve, and answered on the page in about two minutes.

Twelve questions in six pairs. Each pair covers one of the six areas a Unit4 X-Ray assesses formally: configuration drift, defect inventory, control gaps, undocumented architecture, capability deficit and cloud-readiness posture. The result is scored in your browser and names the two areas where your answers are weakest.

No email address is asked for at any point, nothing is submitted anywhere, and no result is stored. It is a self-assessment against twelve questions, not a diagnosis of the estate.

Fee

Freeno email gate, no follow-up unless you ask for one

Duration

About two minutesself-serve, result on the page

Run the free health check

Further reading: what configuration debt looks like in a mature Unit4 estate.

Rung 1. A structured strategic diagnostic of a defined area of your Unit4 Business World estate, delivered as a written executive-grade assessment with a prioritised remediation roadmap.

Price

£14,750indicative; subject to scoping

Duration

About 3 weekssubject to agreed scope

What it assesses

• Configuration drift
• Defect inventory
• Control gaps
• Undocumented architecture
• Capability deficit
• Cloud-readiness posture

What you get

• A plain-English executive report
• A technical configuration blueprint for the systems team, written so your own Unit4 team can act on the findings directly, without needing the consultant to interpret them
• A sequenced remediation roadmap with effort and risk profile
• The SQL evidence pack and diagnostic queries, handed over at the end of the engagement for internal reuse

How it runs

• Discovery through read-only system access and stakeholder interviews
• Analysis through diagnostic queries and configuration trace
• Synthesis, then delivery of all three documents together

See the Unit4 X-Ray brief

Commissioning is subject to your organisation's procurement rules and delegated authority. The price is indicative and subject to formal scoping and a written agreement covering fees, deliverables and delivery arrangements.

Rung 2. A fixed fee and a fixed duration against a process set agreed before work starts.

This is the layer that makes a configured system operable: the written procedure a new starter can follow, the catalogue the service desk works from, and the control matrix somebody owns.

Included

• Procedure manuals and standard operating procedures for the agreed process set, including the monthly payroll playbook
• Build documentation, and a solution design document extracted from the live configuration rather than written from memory
• An error catalogue, decision trees and process maps
• Line manager guides and a support operations manual
• A segregation-of-duties and permission matrix, with create, read, update and delete mapping per role and a task assignment matrix
• The training material that hands the set over: workbooks, facilitator guides, job aids, slide decks and knowledge checks
• Executive briefings written as self-contained HTML documents that leadership can read on any device, without a slide deck or an attachment chain

Excluded

• Configuration change, defect remediation and system build, which belong to rung 4

The deliverable scale, with no client attached

• A suite of more than seventy-five payroll procedure manuals for one public-sector payroll function, covering personnel, pay elements, payroll processing, absence, pensions, deductions, period end and HMRC, reconciliation and system administration
• A full accounts-receivable procedure set of thirteen manuals, from customer record and sales order through payment allocation, matching, write-off, reminders and reporting
• An HR solution design document covering twenty-seven configured HR process areas, built by extracting the live configuration from the production database
• A twenty-four section procurement and purchase order manual covering governance, the procure-to-pay process, roles and approval limits, supplier setup, receipting, three-way match, contract management and data protection

Fee

Fixedconfirmed in the first call

Duration

Fixedagreed at scoping

The fee is confirmed in the first call. Scope, deliverables and fees are agreed in writing before work starts.

Commissioning is subject to your organisation's procurement rules and delegated authority.

Rung 3. PolicyAI is an HR policy assistant that answers staff and line manager policy questions from your own published policy library, citing the source document for each answer.

PolicyAI is a prototype. A working version was documented in a March 2026 briefing, and production deployment requires agreement on identity, security, information governance and support.

It is for the questions that otherwise reach an HR inbox. A deployment is scoped by policy tier, with a governance gate on each: general HR policy as standard deployment, operational HR procedure at service director sign-off, and sensitive domains requiring a data protection impact assessment and service director approval before loading. That is how a deployment is scoped. It is not a statement that any assessment has been completed.

Included

• A written quotation setting out the agreed scope, fees and operating responsibilities
• Policy ownership, query-log handling and deployment rights set out in the written agreement

Fee

Fixedconfirmed in the first call

Duration

Fixedagreed at scoping

The fee is confirmed in the first call, then set out in the written quotation.

See PolicyAI

Commissioning is subject to your organisation's procurement rules and delegated authority.

Rung 4. Retained, embedded, and deliberately capped at typically one or two concurrent clients.

The same senior specialist carries the work from scoping through to delivery. There is no handover to a delivery team. The work happens inside your team: at the change board, the systems stand-up, the audit meeting and the executive briefing, with access appropriate to the agreed work.

Terms

• Day-rate or fixed-scope arrangements, inside IR35 where required
• Scope, deliverables and fees agreed in writing

Excluded

• A bench, an associate network or a second name. There is none, and the cap on concurrent clients is what makes that workable

What that has looked like

• Designing and running a payroll parallel-run and acceptance approach personally, and covering interim project management. Read the engagement
• Taking a higher-education support backlog down while upskilling the team that inherited it. Read the engagement

Fee

Day rate or fixed scopeconfirmed in the first call

Duration

Fixedagreed in writing

The fee is confirmed in the first call.

How an engagement runs

Commissioning is subject to your organisation's procurement rules and delegated authority.