John,

The limit of 6 months for payslips was introduced about 18 months ago, and we newslettered all registered users about that change at the time. We made the change with regret, simply because too few users were upgrading to the Premium version to make our proposition commercially viable. We still have plenty of free users (typically very small companies who don't need payslips) and that suits us fine, because the free users are good PR/marketing for us. And now we are comfortably profitable, which should be good news to our users who want us still to be around next year.

We introduced the limit of 30 employees a few months ago. Above that limit you require a Bureau licence after the trial period is up. It doesn't seem unreasonable to us that sizable businesses that want to use our software should have to pay the tiny sum of £100/year to do so. Comparable offerings for SME's don't even come close to our prices. We have already sold a lot of bureau licences to new users who signed up since the change (existing users got a year's warning of the change so don't have to do anything till next summer). Significantly we haven't had a single complaint about the requirement to buy a bureau licence above 30 employees. On the contrary, and to our slight surprise, several users have expressed relief, having felt previously that they weren't paying enough for what they were getting (a couple have still forthrightly declared that we're far too cheap)

Agreed, the software is good for training, and we're aware of several free users who've used it for that. We don't think that the restrictions on the free software stop it from being a good training tool.

We have no plans to restrict the free software further. On the contrary we'd like to open up our free offering functionality more (perhaps allowing internet filing for small companies with the free software, for example), and like some other payroll software suppliers we've committed to do so if HMRC will stop competing with commercial suppliers by giving away the employer's CDROM backed by an advertising and promotional budget that no commercial supplier can match.

Brenda, The limit for our basic Premium licence is 30 employees per company, in a PAYE year. We believe this is a reasonable limit and it is high compared with competitive products. (eg Sage goes up to its higher priceband after 10 employees, and Moneysoft after 20, if memory serves). All the payroll products that we're aware of that have employee price bands operate the same way, (including leavers), because it is virtually impossible to assess number of "current" employees when there are situations with multiple payrolls. If we were to exclude leavers from the count we'd commercially have to lower the band point, probably to something like 10-15 employees.