About Us

Providing a Personal Payroll Service

We are a very experienced company, committed to providing a great service to all of our clients, focusing on their needs and delivering a service based on their individual requirements. Many of our clients have been benefiting from our comprehensive services for more than a decade, truly reflecting the work that we do and the positive impact we are able to have on businesses throughout the UK. Making payroll simple is something that we aim to achieve for each and every one of our clients, making it easier for them to focus on their business operations rather than their payroll.

Striving for excellence

Since establishing our business, we have worked extremely hard to ensure full compliance as a BACS approved payroll service provider, keeping up to date with all of the latest regulations and legislations that are created for our sector. Our entire payroll personnel are CIPP qualified, ensuring that they have the knowledge and the expertise to answer any of your questions and to work with you to deliver the very best service possible.

As a business, we are continuously improving the way that we work and the service that we provide and it comes as no surprise that we consistently receive a status of excellence in all areas of our business and the sector. We are always looking for ways to improve the service that we provide to our clients, going above and beyond to try new things that will really benefit the businesses that we work with.

What types of businesses do we work with?

Over the years, we have worked with some great businesses, from small businesses operating within the UK to large international businesses working across the globe. We have a wide range of clients, within sectors such as:

• Education
• Manufacturing
• Healthcare
• Retail
• Legal services
• Professional
• Hospitality
• Pre-school

Dedicated Payroll Support

We are very enthusiastic to continue to work with new businesses, providing them with the high standard of services and dedication that is expected of LivePay. Your personal payroll service team are on hand to support your business from Monday to Friday, 8:30am until 5:00pm. Not only do we provide a tried, tested and trusted service, but we also offer great support to our clients, answering any questions that they may have in a quick and professional manner.

Call our sales team today for more information about our payroll services or to discuss how we can have a positive impact on your business. We can provide you with a no obligation quote and you have the opportunity to book a demo to see our system in action.

Our Heritage

Central Computer Management Ltd started trading in 1980 with founder Keith Johnson, initially this was as software supplier to Unisys Computers and their mainframe customers. Keith was initially a computer salesman for Burroughs Computers and noticed that their was a lack of technical support during installation of these machines so decided to set up a company to specialise in this area. This progressed to building software applications for the Unisys machines one of which was a payroll application, this turned out to be a big success in that market space with some major brand names becoming customers. Companies like Alliance & Leicester Building Society, Girobank, Dunlop Topy Wheels, British Alcan to name but a few.

The initial branding of the product fell under the name LPAY, this was short for Linc Payroll, LINC was the programming language that was used to develop the application and the naming structure also fitted with other LINC applications that were developed to be sold in the same market place by Unysis. During the late 1980s Central Computer Management started to sell stationary for use with the payroll software to compliment the existing business model and this grew and became a successful arm of the business.

During the 1990s software sales reached saturation within the mainframe market place and as such Central Computer Management started to offer hosted services for customers, basically the cloud 20 years before it was called the cloud. This would mean customers from all over the country and in some cases around the globe were connecting via Kilostream lines to the mainframes to process their payroll using the LPAY Thin Client application.

In 1998 Central Computer Management split, with the stationary arm of the company becoming its own legal entity “CCM Supplies Ltd” and the two businesses could focus on their area of expertise, this meant the payroll service offering became the sole focus of the organisation and could grow in ways that would benefit the payroll service.

At the turn of the millennium mainframes were being replaced with servers, Central Computer Management was no different. In 2003 the last of the mainframes was retired and replaced with a cheaper and more reliable set of servers. This was also combined with the a greater demand for payroll expertise as payroll professionals was becoming more of specialised role rather than having data input clerks to key in the timesheets, this saw the Bureau operation come into the primary revenue generator for the company.

The LPAY services have achieved national recognition by being awarded the title “Payroll Outsource Provider of the Year” for two years in succession in 2000 and 2001, also receiving highly commended for a number of other years in this time era. The high quality customer service has been something that has always set the company apart in the market place.

With the acquisition of the Kalamazoo payroll bureau client base in 2003 the spread of customer size was increased to include smaller companies. There are still a number of customers who came to LivePay from this acquisition over 20 years later. The acquisition was a logical acquisition as the Kalamazoo payroll bureau was already sitting on the LPAY database being hosted by Central Computer Management and saw and additional 80 or so payrolls move into the bureau operation.

The first steps were made into web technology in 2007 with an online payslip portal being launched whereby employees could log in and view their payslips and P60s. This was followed up by the first version of the online payroll portal which had period payments, standard payments and employee detail input, it was very primitive but allowed for the building blocks of the application that is now used and loved by many customers. New features have been added gradually over the years as technology has improved but making sure that each feature is added with a direct benefit to customers and not as a speculative feature.

In 2011 the LPAY service was rebranded to become more fitting of the modern systems and web applications that were in use and the name of LivePay came into effect. At this time the LivePay service was managing around 160 payrolls for clients ranging in size from 1 person up to 3,000 employees.

Technology has always been at the core of the services that Central Computer Management Ltd have offered, even today we still own and manage our full technology stack from Servers to network infrastructure to disaster recovery equipment on permanent 24/7 standby. By having our own equipment and software to base the bureau operation on, this means that if there is ever a problem with a piece of equipment we are not at the mercy of anyone else and our service continuity is the top priority, fortunately these instances are very rare. So rare the last unexpected outage we had, most customers thought it was at their end not ours as our systems are so reliable! We operate an over 99.9% running time for unplanned downtime.

The technological resilience, disaster recovery and business continuity plans were put into action in February 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic started to make its way to the UK, to ensure that our services were not disrupted the staff was split into three units, one remained at our head office, one went to our disaster recovery office and a third set went to work from home. This was implemented several weeks before the government lockdown was initiated. The technology operated second to none, with most customers not even noticing that in the first instance we had split and moved offices, followed by then spending 10 weeks working from home, we still managed to maintain that 8 second target for getting the phones answered which had become synonymous with the service. Over the next couple of years with various lockdowns and work from home orders the team were pushed and pulled in many directions, not only with working in different ways but also with having to deal with the additional workload that the Furlough scheme brought with it, Furlough saw the workload in the company increase by approximately 40% overnight! The speed at which the system was changed to deal with COVID SSP reclaim and Furlough was almost unrivalled in the UK, the SSP change was deployed by 11am the following morning when it was announced on the 6pm news, this was the first time we were made aware of this change, the first of its kind since SSP was introduced.

The latest chapter of the company commenced in November 2022 when Keith Johnson officially stepped down as Managing Director and his eldest son Marc took over. This transition was a carefully planned and gradual transition which saw Marc working in all areas of the business and acquiring a degree in payroll from the CIPP to ensure a seamless transition. Marc became a company Director in 2019 and took over the management of the operations side of the business which included the payroll processing functions, payroll support and software development. The company has increased the number of payrolls substantially in the last 10 years to now operating over 300 payrolls on behalf of our customer base.