FYE is a brutal time of year for payrollers. It is the most common time in any business cycle for head office payroll employees to hand in their notice, you can check out the jobs sites now and see just how many Payroll Exec vacancies have just been published in the last few days. It’s true that hospitality payroll can be hard enough to tackle at any point in the year, flexible hours, enrolments, holiday etc, etc, etc can make it painful enough, let alone the additional burden that the upcoming deadlines of a year-end brings. If you are meant to be preparing your year-end payroll responsibilities right now, and found this blog while procrastinating, well, we sympathise and offer you hope and a little steer on some key things to get right.
How not to stress over your FPS
Sending a final Full Payment Submission (FPS) can be a huge job, but it is critical to identify and rectify any potential errors before submission. While this must be done before or on your employees’ payday, getting organised early can avoid the agony of retrospective adjustments.
Doing this manually on spreadsheets by hand will inevitably be time consuming and inaccurate, however a good payroll system should handle and automate all of this for you. When you run the final period of a tax year in S4labour, the ‘Final submission for year will automatically put’ indicator on the FPS for you – if no employees are being paid, this will go on the EPS.
Get in to TAX CODE mode
For each employee working for you either old or new, on the 6th of April you will need to have a payroll record and the correct tax code to use in the new tax year. You should check the P9X document published by HMRC that explains what tax codes employers must change to on 6 April. Here is the all important link to the HMRC website where you can view the P9X document – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/p9x-tax-codes
This document is not for the faint hearted, but the good news is that your payroll software should keep you and your employees up to date automatically. S4labour has a direct link to HMRC, and their tax updates are received via electronic updates to make the process seamless.
Always P60 before you Party
At the end of each final year and no later than the 5th of April, all employees must be given a P60 that summarises their total pay and deductions for the year. It’s good to get organised with your year end jobs, but processing P60’s shouldn’t be done before the final payslip has been issued.
The P60 is auto generated when the final payroll of the tax year is completed and accessible to employees via their S4labour employee portal on final pay day for the tax year.
Its Getting Late to do an Update
Each year, businesses must get updated and aligned with the latest rates and thresholds for Income Tax, National Insurance, Student Loan Repayments and National Minimum Wage. There is a great deal of information on this on the HMRC website. However, for those who don’t have time to keep track of the annual changes (or factor in more than 7 hours of sleep at night), your payroll should do all of this hard work for you.
HMRC updates are automatically done through S4labour each year, so you do not have to worry.
If you would like to know more about how Payroll from S4labour, you can book a demo.