Growing your company is exciting and when you take on your first employee you know it’s going in the right direction. But with this kind of growth comes a new kind of responsibility. Your employees need to get paid and this means you must start running a payroll.
What is payroll
Payroll is made up of the salaries, wages, bonuses, taxes and National Insurance for employees. As an employer you must perform a certain number of tasks during each tax month. In the UK, a tax month runs from the 6th of the month to the 5th of the following month.
Employer’s duties regarding payroll
As soon as you employ one person you may need to start running a payroll. Here is a list of duties, employers have to perform each month:
- Record each employee’s pay. This includes their wages/salary as well as benefits and any other type of payment.
- Calculate their tax and National Insurance contributions
- For each employee earning above £157 per week, there is also the employer’s National Insurance contribution which is currently set at 13.8%
- Inform your employees about their pay details (pay and deductions) via payslips (paper or electronic) and HMRC via a document called Full Payment Submission (FPS).
- Fulfil your Auto Enrolment responsibilities
The following tax month, an employer then has to
- Claim any reduction on what they owe to HMRC (such as statutory maternity or paternity pay) via an Employer Payment Summary (EPS)
- Pay HMRC anything they owe. The deadline for electronic payment is the 22nd of the month.
At the end of the tax year, every employer needs to
- Submit their year-end payroll summary to HMRC
- Give P60s to employees
If you miss any of the filing or payment deadlines, there are usually fines to pay.
Once upon a time, all of this had to be done manually but nowadays there are software packages than can do a fair bit of the work for you automatically. However, you must make sure that all the deadlines are met.
How Alba can help with your payroll
There are many different companies providing payroll software. Here at Alba we can offer you a complete payroll service tailor-made for your business. You can get on with the running of your business and leave payroll to us. We will make sure that your payroll is done on time. In addition, you will have a dedicated qualified payroll manager working for you. You can contact them by phone or email.
Get in touch if you want to find out more about how we can help your business. You can email us at admin@alba.uk.com or telephone 01509 853779.
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