Switching Providers
Moving a person between providers re-employs them, and the things that break are continuity and goodwill.
Ending the service agreement
Ending the person's employment
Moving them to your own entity
The person simply resigning
YoursThe provider'sCrosses the twoNeither contract
Four matters, and no share: what any one agreement covers differs by agreement. One crosses both, and the handoff is where these arrangements fail. Three endings, and only one of them is yours to start and finish.
Moving somebody from one provider to another re-employs them. A new employer, a new contract, a new payroll, and whatever continuity of service local law does or does not preserve.
The contractual distinction in “Switching Providers” also matters when buying workforce software. For teams researching daily schedule template, read the full platform outline should be evaluated against a named operational decision, clear ownership, export requirements and a tested exit process rather than treated as a substitute for the employment agreement.
What breaks is rarely the administration. It is continuity and goodwill, and both are repairable only in advance.
Teams reviewing “Switching Providers” can cross-check their approach against the PwC workforce resources. The comparison should produce written questions for the provider, adviser or internal owner instead of a copied checklist.
Why buyers switch
Price, service quality, coverage in a new country, or consolidation onto a single provider after a period of accumulating them.
All reasonable. The question worth asking first is whether the gain is larger than the disruption, which for one or two people it frequently is not.
Price in particular is a poor reason on its own. The saving is a monthly fee; the cost is a re-employment and whatever it does to the person's view of the arrangement.
What the person experiences
Their employer changes, for reasons that have nothing to do with them, on a timeline set by somebody else, with paperwork they have to sign in order to keep the job they already have.
Nothing about that is enjoyable. Acknowledging it is the minimum.
The sequence
Select the new provider. Check the exit terms in the old agreement. Agree dates. Have the new provider issue contracts. Serve notice on the old one. Coordinate end and start dates. Verify the first payroll.
Seven steps, three months, and a cut-over that has to be exact:
- Select the new provider.
- Check the exit terms in the old agreement.
- Agree the dates with both.
- Have the new provider issue contracts.
- Serve notice on the old one.
- Coordinate the end and start dates.
- Verify the first payroll line by line.
Run it as a project with a named owner and a date. Treated as an administrative change handled alongside other work, it produces exactly the gaps this note is about.
Service carried over, or not
The same question as any conversion, with the same local answer. In some jurisdictions it transfers, in many it does not.
Where it does not, decide whether to grant it contractually with the new employer. Somebody losing two years of accrued service because you changed supplier has a legitimate complaint.
Leave balances
Accrued leave is paid out by the old employer or carried by the new, depending on the country and on what is agreed.
Settle it explicitly. The failure mode is a balance that disappears between two systems, which the person notices months later.
Benefits and cover
New policies, new waiting periods, possible gaps. Medical cover in particular can lapse for weeks if nobody plans the overlap.
Ask both providers specifically about the cut-over date for each benefit. They will not volunteer it.
Restrictions in the old agreement
Non-solicitation clauses can bite here as well as on a conversion to your own entity. Read the old agreement before approaching anybody.
Some providers charge a fee on transfer out. Discovering it after signing with a new provider removes your ability to negotiate it.
The cut-over
The last day with the old employer and the first with the new should be consecutive. A gap interrupts entitlements and in some countries affects social security continuity.
Verify both contracts carry the dates you agreed, rather than the dates somebody assumed.
Ask each provider to confirm its own date in writing. The two companies are not talking to each other and have no reason to reconcile anything.
Checking the first payroll
The highest-risk payroll in the whole arrangement: new employer, new system, part-month calculations, a tax code that may not have arrived.
Check it line by line against the old one and against what was agreed. An error here lands on a person who has just been through an unwelcome change.
Data
Employment records stay with the old provider under their retention obligations. The new one starts fresh.
Make sure anything you need — the schedule, filing evidence, historical payroll reports — has been exported before the account closes and the portal stops working.
Do it before serving notice rather than afterwards. Access to a supplier's system has a way of becoming difficult once the relationship is ending.
What to tell the person, and when
As early as the commercial position allows. What is changing, what is not, what you are doing to protect their position, and what they need to sign.
Giving them the reason, even a dull commercial one, is better than a process that arrives as a series of documents from a company they have not heard of.
What a switch cannot recover
The relationship. Somebody who has been through a provider change understands, permanently and correctly, that their employment is an administrative arrangement your company can alter at will.
That realisation is not wrong and cannot be undone. Where the arrangement is meant to be long-term and the person is meant to be central, the better answer is usually to build your own entity rather than to move them a second time, and the cost of the switch is part of what should be weighed when deciding.