10 Great Reason For Outsourcing Your Payroll

COST

Big businesses can afford to maintain big payroll departments. For small businesses however, an in-house payroll service is a money burner. If you calculate the hours your employees spend on payroll-related activities, plus payroll software costs, training costs, printers, printing and distributing payslips, creating tax documents etc, you could be surprised by the result when you compare that amount to the cost a payroll service provider can offer.

RESOURCES

The payroll function can consume a large proportion of your staff resources, especially if the staff in charge of the payroll are not trained specifically to deal with it or have the payroll function as a smaller part of their overall responsibilities. The benefits of outsourcing the payroll include freeing up these resources allowing your staff to concentrate on more essential tasks. You may even be able to reduce your staff’s size. Outsourced functions also give you better scope for expansion of your company with scalable services suited to your business.

TRAINING

It can often be expensive to employ staff with the necessary training to operate a payroll system. For smaller companies where the payroll role is not enough to warrant a full-time employee, you may have to use your current staff to train in payroll as an additional responsibility to their core role. Your payroll staff will also need to keep up to date with the latest tax procedures and legislation.

Read more »

Real Time Information: An Introduction

By now you would surely have heard about Real Time Information (RTI), the completely new system of reporting PAYE to HMRC. Starting from April 2013, under RTI, employers will submit information about PAYE payments to HMRC online throughout the year, rather than at the end of the year. Every time you process your payroll, your software will collect the necessary information and send it to HMRC online on or before each actual pay day. All required information must be complete, accurate and up to date.

The concept is to:

  • make the PAYE process simpler and less burdensome for employers and HMRC
  • simplify the employee starting and leaving processes
  • make PAYE more accurate for employees, eventually reducing the number of bills and repayments sent after the end of the tax year
  • enable HMRC to pursue late payments more effectively
  • support the payment of Universal Credits
  • reduce Tax Credits errors and frauds

Read more »

Paye Late Filing Penalties

HMRC have addressed the concerns about the delay in informing employers of late PAYE end of year returns and subsequent penalties. In previous years, employers who did not file their annual P35 return by 19 May incurred penalties of £100 per 50 or fewer employees for each month that their return was late. In some cases, employers were unaware there returns were late until they received a first penalty letter in September covering 4 months worth of accrual penalties.

HMRC have now announced a number of agreed measures to deal with this problem:

  1. HMRC will change the date of the ‘Notification to complete form P35 Employer Annual Return’ from mid February to mid March, so that employers will receive it much nearer to the end of the tax year.
  2. From 28 April 2012, where HMRC believe a 2011/12 P35 remains outstanding, they will issue an ‘Employer Annual Return Reminder’.
  3. From 31 May, HMRC will introduce a ‘P35 Interim Penalty Letter’ which will reach employers within a month of the filing deadline. The letter will state that the employer has incurred a late return penalty and explain what to do to avoid it increasing.

Together with improved online guidance for submitting P35s, these measures should help employers to avoid incurring unnecessary penalties and significantly reduce the number of cases where penalties in excess of £100 are charged.

First Employer Obligations For Pensions

Don’t be fooled into thinking Auto enrolment is too far away in the future to worry about yet.

The first thing an employer should do in preparation for the new employer duties is to find out when their staging date is likely to be.  The staging date will be based on the size of your PAYE scheme on 1 April 2012 and if the number of persons in an employer’s PAYE scheme changes between 1 April 2012 and their staging date, the staging date will not be affected, even if the change is significant.

The second stage is Safeguarding Individuals. This is because regardless of the size of your PAYE scheme, the law on the new employer duties and safeguards will commence from July 2012, even if your staging date is months and years away.  The safeguards are intended to protect individuals, meaning there are certain things the employer must not do, both before a person starts working for them and once that person is a member of a pension scheme with that employer.

The safeguards include:

  • Stopping active membership of a qualifying scheme
  • Unfair treatment of workers
  • Inducements
  • Prohibited recruitment conduct
  • For more details go to www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk

Tax Year End Preparations

The end of another tax year is approaching. This is a busy time for payrollers and there are numerous payment and reporting deadlines to be met if penalties are to be avoided. It is vital that employers and their agents understand what needs to be done and when, and that they have all the required information to hand so that the process can be handled smoothly and efficiently. I advise all employers to start their year end preparations early March with the following checklist:

Read more »