Do I need a Payroll Accountant?

Payroll is a vital part of running your business with employee payments along with paying and reporting to HMRC top priorities.

The process of running your own payroll can be time consuming with strict HMRC payroll compliance requirements and deadlines.

If you don’t get your payroll right you risk under or overpaying an employee and HMRC penalties.

It doesn’t matter how many employees you have or which field your business operates in it’s worth considering using a payroll accountant.

Why use a Payroll Accountant?

Setting up your payroll system is as complicated as it is essential. No one wants to be apologising for late salary payments.

It is crucial that you know exactly what you have to record, report and pay from your very first pay day to your very first employee.

Outsourcing this complex duty to a payroll accountant allows you to fully focus on building your business.

Your payroll accountant can act as an HMRC agent and communicate with them on your business’s behalf to fix any issues on your behalf.

Some of the duties your payroll accountant can manage include:

• End of year P60 and P11d submissions.
• Maternity and Paternity pay.
• Statutory Adoption Pay.
• Sick Pay.
• Generating P45s for employees who are leaving.
• Processing statutory payments.
• PAYE reports on a monthly or quarterly basis.
• Payroll data reports to fit your requirements.
• Processing attachment of earnings.
• BACs payment service.
• Posting or emailing payslips to your employees.
• Security payslips.

RTI Compliant Payroll Software

RTI (Real Time Information) was designed by HMRC to improve the accuracy of the PAYE system.

It helps to reduce corrections for over and underpayments and reducing the possibility of fraud against your business.

Using a payroll accountant ensures legally compliant software is used so that your PAYE information can be submitted in real time.

Some of the benefits outsourced payroll software can bring include:

• An array of different payroll report templates to choose from and the option to print or email them.
• To make any payments related to payroll as we are an accredited ‘BACs bureau’. This includes things like pensions, salary and payments to HMRC.
• Set up eP60s and ePayslips. This involves individual login details for every employee so they can see their financial details within a safe website.

Pension Auto Enrolment

The Workplace Pension scheme isn’t relevant to all employees with a strict eligibility criteria in place.

It is crucial that you can rely on your outsourced payroll provider to build these procedures into your business’s system.

Your payroll accountant can ensure that you are auto enrolment compliant for all of your employees.

Payroll is quite a big subject so if you would like to find out a bit more you can use our free Guide to Company Payroll »