When you employ a team, payroll becomes a fact of life! A PAYE scheme must be setup and operated as soon as you take on a team member earning more than £120 per week. Payroll essentially calculates the net pay that should be paid to the employee, after income tax, national insurance contributions and auto-enrolment pension contributions have been taken off. There may also be other expenses and benefits to be included in the calculation. Employees will need to be provided with a payslip detailing this calculation and then fInally, all that information has to be sent over to HMRC by payday each month.

With SGW, we make that service as smooth as possible by providing our clients and their employees access to a portal which has the following features:

For the Employer:

  • online request and submission for timesheet data for each pay period;
  • storage area with access to all or specific employees to store important HR documents such as employee handbooks or contracts;
  • holiday and leave administration and approvals system.

For the Employee:

  • online access to all their payslips, P60s, P45 etc
  • online holiday and leave requests
  • app that they can download to their phone to access the above.

Can I run my own payroll?

Yes, absolutely! Xero have a payroll module you can setup, or you can use other software such as BrightPay to process everything and create the necessary submissions for HMRC. These softwares come at a very reasonable price and have plenty of training online to show you how to process payroll through those softwares.

While basic payroll might be quite easy to run once it’s all setup, it does start to get more complicated when other aspects come in, and you do need to understand what needs to happen in order for it to be setup correctly within the payroll software. For example, maternity leave – what paperwork do you need in place, how much notice do you need, how do you calculate it correctly, and then how do you process that so all the information goes back to HMRC? Another example could be something as simple as a variable hour employee – how do you calculate their holiday pay? Did you know, although many businesses do still do it, it’s technically illegal to roll up and employee’s holiday pay? Unpaid leave for regular hour employees – how do you caluclate that and include it in the pay calculation? Expenses and benefits, do you know whether they should be included before or after the taxable pay is calculated?

As with accountants, people who run payroll also go through a lot of training to make sure they are processing payroll correctly and within the rules. Which is why we offer the service at SGW, so that you do not have to spend hours researching the answers when you should be focusing on running your business.