Payroll is the business’s biggest cost and ensuring your employee are paid on time and accurately is extremely important. As a payroll professional with over 20 years under my belt, here are the top four ‘eye-roll’s’ my clients experience.

Eye-roll one.

Managing multiple deadlines with the risk of lateness penalties   

Running an accurate and timely payroll means adhering to multiple deadlines throughout the month from salary HMRC/PAYE and Court Order payments to leavers, starters and RTI reporting.

For owner-managed businesses, it is usually the case that the person processing the payroll has other responsibilities and this can mean a significant amount of juggling to ensure that late penalties are not incurred.

Eye-roll two.

Misunderstanding of payroll processes         

A payroll department requires robust processes, deadlines and controls. It is useful to keep a calendar of key dates and to ensure that this is accessible by other members of the team especially if you have sole responsibility for running the payroll.

Your disaster recovery plan should incorporate a safeguarding system so that your payroll is not disrupted should an accident/illness or other unavoidable catastrophe take you away from the office at short notice.

Eye-roll three.

Keeping up with ever changing legislation    

Payroll legislation is constantly changing as well as relevant case law. From the most basic, the national living and minimum wages are usually changed annually for certain statutory pay entitlements in line with the Consumer Price Index. In comparison to the changes in furlough leave entitlements through the Covid pandemic, this is a relatively easy change to keep on top of. However, I cannot emphasise enough that the speed and volume of changes can be arduous.

Eye-roll four.

Privacy/GDPR legislations     

The Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK response to the wider GPPR European Act changed the way business operate and handle data. Payroll teams process and hold critical amount of personal data, so it is extremely important this is kept secure and communicated securely at all time.

Shaw Gibbs have a qualified payroll team who are kept up to date on all legislation and can assist you to navigate your payroll and support with queries throughout the month, we can act as a BACS Approved Bureau in order to process payments on your behalf and supply reminder emails to assist with items retained in-house.