Parasolisms

Yet again, my impression of Parasol has taken a downturn. Which in itself is pretty impressive, because my impression of them wasn’t all that good to start with.

First of all (and this is going back a bit) I’ve always felt that I was getting over-charged, and not coming out each month with as much money as I should’ve been. Parasol have always strenuously denied this, telling me I was getting all the benefits of a professional umbrella company. (Stop laughing, you at the back) However, I recently received a notification from HMCE that in the 2006/7 tax year, I’d overpaid £1800 of tax – in other words, Parasol had screwed things up to the tune of £150 per month. I’m about 95% certain that they’ve done the same thing this year, too.

Wednesday, though, topped it off.

At 3.30, I got an email from them.

With effect from Monday 21st April 2008, your Parasol admin deduction will be revised to £87.95 (from £79.95) per month. This small increase has been introduced to allow us to continue to provide our unrivalled and market leading services along with improvements to insurance cover.

At 3.45 I got another email from them.

With effect from Monday 21st April 2008, your Parasol admin deduction will be revised to £95.50 per month. This small increase has been introduced to allow us to continue to provide our unrivalled and market leading services along with improvements to insurance cover.

Not bad – a 20% price increase in less than 30 minutes.

There was another communique at about 5pm effectively saying “Ooops, the first one was the correct price” – but all the same, it’s not exactly the most impressive way of doing things, is it?

Thank Christ I’ll be leaving them in a couple of weeks, once the business bank account is set up. Simply changing to letting the accountant do my payroll instead of Parasol is going to save me something like £50 per month. That’s proper money, that is.