JamesVRSmk3

Correct - By adjusting your payments you are only making sure they claw back some of the excess milleage charges.

This is nothing at all to do with cheap Chinese imports. A simple ferrite magnets fixes this issue.

Will get onto them shortly. I'm convinced that's what killed my battery as at one point twice a day it would take 10 seconds to fire up - leaving for work and returning home.

Ah good - Can't wait to go back to the dealers and tell them this. Even after showing them videos of my car taking 10 seconds to start he said it was "normal for diesels in cold weather". Is it just a service bulletin? Want to be armed with facts as they always put up a fight. The customer is always wrong at my dealership

Sort of got a result.... They dropped all the additional setup/monthly fees so we could let them finish the year end and run the pensions for March. However we've just received a 20 page document on how we need to now submit excel files for payroll once a month starting April, upload them to one system and view payslips on another......all extremely complicated and will take us a minimum of 20 minutes to do once a month vs the current system of giving them a quick phone call and saying "no changes". More work for us, none for them (as they are outsourcing this) and still paying the same. We've terminated their contract and setup SageOne Payroll....extremely simple and up and running within an hour! Now saving £400pa and a huge amount of time so win win all round.

VW have been doing it for a couple of years. They haven't started it at my local Skoda dealers yet though.

If you get to the bottom of the unwillingness to start please let me know how they solve it. Despite showing my dealers a video of my car taking 10 seconds to start and nearly draining the battery flat in the process I'm still being told it "normal for a diesel in the cold weather". Ps: I feel your pain. 23 months of ownership and roughly 6 weeks of being sat in a dealers being worked on for various faults.

The hot water control abilities are via an extension box which is an additional purchase to the tado thermostat. It is a plain white unit (about twice the width of the thermostat) which replaces the programmer on the system. The thermostat on it's own doesn't control hot water - that's what I was led to believe and is the case in my Tado setup.

Ah ok thanks didn't realise that. Yes they used to be a very approachable company to deal with and always at the end of the phone but were recently acquired by a much larger firm who seem to be milking existing clients with endless new fees and getting rid of any telephone contact which is a real shame. We are going to run that by him as it may be the case that he can run the payroll for us when he is in and we pay him for an extra hours time. The current accountants for the payroll also do our yearly audits and companies house submissions. He wouldn't take this role over. We will be investigating moving this to another firm - it's a case where we have just always used them as they were the only chartered accountants local to us at the time when we started business and we wanted to work with someone local who we could pop into at any time - they are a 2 minute walk away. It may be a case that we are paying well over the odds for the audit or paying well below average we just don't know.

Thanks - will take a look at SJ Software. Our gripe is we have completed all the autoenrollment duties in-house - We've sent all the letters, setup with a pensions provider, enrolled everyone, done all the calculations, registered with the pensions regulator and it looks like Sage will do the rest. They now want £76 extra per year for compliance but they will not say what this compliance is. We've already told them we will be doing all the calculations and enrolling new staff etc so there is nothing extra for them to do. They still haven't explained it so putting it down as them providing a double check which we do not want to pay £76 a year (on top of the £400) for. Our payroll is extremely simple - all staff are on 10+ years services so we do not have a high turnover of staff, and all are on fixed yearly salaries which are well above the thresholds for being auto enrolled so there will be no need check the salaries once a month to see if anyone has fallen in or out of autoenrollment. As our provider is NEST, all calculations are done online - you enter the base salary every month and it automatically calculates the rest (ee's and er's contributions) and automatically takes the amount from our bank account. I forgot to say in the original post that our accountants are changing to a new system where we do not contact them by phone anymore (but this is apparently for our benefit) and instead have to login online to add salary figures and pensions contributions. We feel if we are having to put this extra work in once a month we may aswell enter them in to Sage ourselves directly as it won't cost us anymore in additional manpower. I've consulted with our other accountant who comes in once a month (monthly accounts and VAT etc) and he has experience in running the payroll in other companies he works for so will go through everything with us when he's in later this month. As a business owner I fully appreciate the value people place on their time and they should charge for this but in this case they are simply taking the proverbial seeing as we will have to put in additional work ourselves from now on (which is nothing to do with autoenrollment) whilst paying them more and getting less of a service.

We have an accountant who comes in once a month to do our monthly accounts, quarterly VAT etc and he uses Sage on one of our machines but never gets involved in payroll. I've only opened the programme to run some reports a couple of times over the last 5 years but found that part very straight forward. Just worried there may be some tax office things which I've overlooked. Although it appears the tax codes are automatically sent via the RTI system so we shouldn't have to do anything I'm convinced there must be something the accountants are doing to earn their £400 per year and not just print off 5 payslips per month. There is a 30 day trial of the Sage Payroll package so I installed it this afternoon and will play around over the weekend and see if everything works as it should. As it's the end of the tax year shortly it makes sense to let the current accountants run the last month and then take over ourselves next month.

Has anyone here got any experience at this? In particular Sage Payroll? Our situation.... We've been using a local accountants since we began 21 years ago who run our payroll at roughly £400pa. There are only 5 employees. We have just registered with a pensions provider for autoenrollment which was pretty straightforward, registered with the Pensions Regulator and carried out all the formalities. I emailed the accountants this week to give them the months figures for pensions deductions for the end of March as our staging date was 1st of March. I've just had an email back stating it will cost us £250 for them to set this up at their end plus an ongoing cost of £76 per year to administer. Now as far as I can see there is zero setup for them to do and an ongoing fee to add one line of text to the payslip is ridiculous seeing as we are carrying out all the payments ourselves - they simply email us the payslips and we make the payments each month manually. Only last week we were considering bringing payroll in-house to save ourselves £400pa so getting told we now have an ongoing fee for pensions is making this decision a lot easier. I've been investigating Sage Payroll all week and from what I can make out its extremely simple and we should probably have been using it for the last 10 years and saving ourselves a fortune. It looks like it meets all the autoenrollment criteria and will cost us a mere £5 a month all in. As it has RTI built in I'm guessing this covers all the tax code updates etc so we shouldn't have any tax office issues to deal with and it should work automatically? Am I missing anything obvious? It just seems too simple to setup and run ourselves and it feels like I must be missing something?

Go to page 5 and look at the photo I put up - I simply pushed it in the gap on the join at the top of the pillar but didn't actually push the cable through.

They already have. Go back through the thread - page 6

The car does not "use" coolant. If the levels going down its leaking.

There are no secret insurance clubs which have cheaper than everyone else insurance. Just use the usual go compare / meerkat etc and find the cheapest. There are a couple of brokers registered on here so take a look at the insurance thread but I've never found these cheaper than "over the counter" insurance.

If you ordered within a specific offer period (such a 0% finance) and then change the order outside of this offer then I think you lose the original offer.....that's what my dealer told me anyway when I wanted to add stuff to mine after the original 0% deal in 2014.

Canton or standard system? I've never managed to get my Canton system anywhere near maximum.

No performance benefit but there would be a sound 'benefit'. If I wasn't giving the car back at the end of the PCP I would have jumped at this.

Well it turns out I have "self healing" brakes. My car was back in the dealers for further warranty work and on this latest health check my brakes are in perfect conditions and not worn at all...... I pointed out that only 3 months ago they were down to 10% and he said it must have been a mistake last time....despite him being the same person who gave me the previous report and giving me the price to get them both replaced So I am none the wiser and going to take it to a "proper" garage this week to get them checked and find out the real condition.

Ive got Kessy so just push the button and it does the rest.

Does any technically minded person know how much battery is used per second when starting the car? I've had a very random issue whereby the car sometimes takes 5/10 seconds to start and just keeps cranking (I've seen quite a few reports of this on the forum). On average it does this once a week - but sometimes every day when starting from cold - either going to work or leaving. I am convinced that this is what is draining my battery as the short drive to work isn't replenishing the battery enough so every long start is just further decreasing the battery level. I reported this to Skoda when I first had this issue (Summer last year I think) but they couldn't replicate it. I have told them about it again and asked if this could be the issue but was told diesels always take a long time to start in the cold...which is funny because the courtsey car I have which is also a diesel, starts instantly every time. I started filming my start ups last week knowing the car was going in yesterday for a replacement battery and showed the guy the videos and he made a note of the problem on the service sheet when I dropped the car off but he wouldn't agree that it isn't normal. They still have my car as they wanted to perform a drain test today so waiting for a call back to collect or say they have a problem but if anyone knows the figure it would at least give me some info.

Feel quite deprived. All I got was a free keyring.

If in reply to me they've checked the alternator and that's fine. No idea where it's coming from but they don't stock batteries at the dealership. I need a courtesy car while mine is in so the Monday may be the first day one is free as there is always a long wait for one there.

Car was in with Skoda on Monday and Tuesday. They've ordered a replacement battery as it's knackered and arrives next week so in the mean time they've fully charged the old one which should easily last until next week. Apparently the car was absolutely loaded with error messages when running the diagnostics - an unheard of amount. They couldn't confirm the start/stop and various other problems are 100% related to the battery but they are 99% certain as everything is now functioning when fully charged. They are going to perform a drain test on Monday when it goes in for the new battery to work out what's going on and where the drain is and also going to run another diagnostics to see whether the errors have stopped with a fully charged and working battery.