Paying your staff shouldn’t be confusing, and nor should it be complicated, but for a lot of businesses trying to manage their own payroll on top of running their actual business it can be one step too many
That’s why we offer payroll services for all businesses, regardless of whether we complete your business accounts or not.
Our payroll department has over 5 years of experience and can answer all your payroll, pension, or CIS related queries, in a way that you can understand.
Following the first call/meeting where we’ll go through exactly what you need from us, we’ll get you set up on FreshPay which is a cloud-based payroll software, meaning we can process your payroll securely even if our staff are working from home.
FreshPay allows you to have your own Employer Portal where you can view everything due to your employees and HMRC. This portal enables us to send over the payroll information for checking once processed. If everything is correct, then you just accept it which allows us to finalise and send it to HMRC, but if something doesn’t look right then you can reject it and let us know what needs correcting.
Your employees can also have access to their own portal, which means they can download their payslips on payday along with any pension letters and the all-important P60. They are unable to edit any of the payroll information but means you don’t have to email individual payslips each week or month.
Within your employer portal you will also see the amount of PAYE tax due to HMRC each month, but if you would like a friendly reminder then our team can still drop you an email each month confirming the amount of PAYE due and any payment references you need.
Every time you take on a new starter, we will provide you with a new employee form which they will need to complete with all the relevant information needed for us to set them up on the software and start processing their payroll. From time to time, we may receive tax code updates from HMRC which will automatically be applied. As we don’t act for your employees personally then if they have any queries with their tax codes or pay in general then they would need to discuss this with HMRC.
Another aspect of payroll is Auto Enrolment, which is also something covered by any payroll quote we give you. Depending on the age of your employee and how much they earn then they may need to be auto enrolled but can choose to opt out at any time. As an Employer you can choose to postpone any pension enrollments for 3 months for new starters, which a lot of our clients choose to do.
We’re unable to advise on which Pension Provider you should choose for your Auto Enrolment duties as this falls outside the scope of what we are able to advise on as Accountants, but we can help you set up the scheme if you wish to choose Nest, which is the workplace scheme set up by the Government.
If you would rather choose a different provider (Creative Pensions, Smart Pensions, Aviva etc.) then that’s no problem at all. Although we can’t help setting up the scheme, we can still process the payroll and make any submissions to them/provide you with the information to send to them.
We’re also able to help with the Re-Enrolment and Re-Declarations required by the Pension Regulator so you can rest assured your statutory obligations will be taken care of.
If your business operates within the Construction Industry Scheme, then you may have obligations as a Contractor and/or a Subcontractor. Very basically, if you’re a subcontractor then you may have CIS Tax deducted from your income and if you’re a contractor, you may have to deduct CIS Tax from any subcontractor invoices before you pay them. This CIS tax information will be sent to HMRC each month alongside any PAYE information from your payroll scheme and may increase or decrease the amount of PAYE tax due to HMRC.
Another thing we can take care of for you is verifying your subcontractors with HMRC which means you will know how much CIS tax to deduct – either 0% 20% or 30%.
We use Xero for our CIS submissions as this ties in with a lot of clients using Xero for their VAT and bookkeeping. The monthly CIS statements can be emailed directly to your subcontractors, or we can send them over to you so you can send them on.
If you’d like to see how we can help you with your Payroll and CIS, then contact us now.
