Professional Payroll Services

CIPP

We are members of the CIPP – Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals.

Automatic Enrolment

We promote good practice in pension administration based on the TPR guidance.

HMRC

We are meeting HMRC payroll standards and using only HMRC accredited software.

What can we help with?

Your business is unique, and we believe your payroll service should reflect this. We will get to know you, your workforce, and the common issues you are facing to tailor our solution to your requirements. Our offering includes outsourced payroll, automatic enrolment pension administration and more.

Why Us?

Safe and Compliant Payroll – Top Tips

We have put some top tips together on how to keep your payroll safe and compliant.

Deadlines

Knowing the pay dates and how they are affected by national, and Bank Holidays is key. It is also important to know how changing a regular pay date may affect employees’ universal credit claims. There are also deadlines to adhere to when it comes to payments to HMRC and other third parties such as DWP or Child Maintenance Service or pensions and benefits providers. Late or non-payments can cost you money in fines and penalties.

Software

Choose payroll software that will be good for your type of business and the payroll you process. It is crucial to prepare a software statement of requirements to see what features are important to ensure they are available in the programme you have chosen. The cost per employee is also important as with some payroll software choices it will cost you more with each employee you add. Some providers also charge extra for additional features such as automatic enrolment add-on or P11D and CIS processing.

The software should also be HMRC approved so that all calculations are compliant with the latest regulations.

Is your software package ready to prepare reports you would require regularly? It is important to check with your bookkeeper or accountant what they require as well, as this could save you time down the line.

If you are using a time and attendance system, is your payroll software ready to accept data directly from that system? Manual re-keying of data is the main reason for errors.

Licences

You will have to take care of regular software updates and those are not free of charge with some providers. Some licences will cover you for one tax year and some will cover you for a set number of employees only.

Updating records

It is vital to keep all your employees’ records up to date as their payroll calculations may be incorrect. You must be compliant with tax and NI but also automatic enrolment pension regulations and rules around the national minimum and living wage.

Your employees should have a way of updating their records whenever they change, and regular auditing of the payroll and employee records is important.

Keep up to date

Keeping up to date with ever-changing payroll legislation is vital. 2020 was a great test for robustness and reliance of payroll teams around the UK, with furlough legislation changing almost daily. Do you have resources to keep on top of things?

Training and Support

You will have to think about investing money in training your staff in ever-changing legislation and using the software package you choose.

If for any reason your payroll manager leaves, you must remember it takes time and money to bring a new person up to speed on the payroll procedures and systems in place. Without a plan, the business continuity is in danger.

Disaster recovery and contingency planning

Another reason your business continuity may be affected are software failures of viruses and data breaches. Make sure your processes are GDPR compliant and you have a backup up plan should payroll data be lost due to circumstances out of your control.

If this seems too much and you would rather outsource the payroll function to a professional payroll bureau – get in touch with Be Payroll today for a quote.