As An Employer You Are Subject To A Myriad Of Laws

As An Employer You Are Subject To A Myriad Of Laws

Being an employer in the UK today is fraught with certain dangers, because there are so many different rules and regulations that you really need to be a qualified lawyer or accountant to understand them all. It is not enough just to be an entrepreneur – you have to abide by rules that you may never even have considered had anything to do with your business, and there can be fines for breaching them and in the worst cases even jail terms!

Take fire safety as an example. Your premises have to be safe for your employees to work in and for any visitors who might come on to them. That’s fair enough. But you have to undertake a fire safety assessment, and if you have more than four employees keep a written record of it. Just how many businessmen – accountants, solicitors, corner shop owners, art gallery owners, pub landlords, to name a few – are qualified to undertake a fire risk assessment? Most of them wouldn’t even know where to begin. One wedding venue owner converted part of his building to accommodation and was fined £24,000 and jailed for 21 months a couple of years ago because he didn’t understand the fire regulations.

Fortunately, it is possible to have your fire risk assessment carried out by professionals who do know what to look for and are conversant with the law.

Another area that is subject to fines is anything to do with HMRC. As soon as you take on your first employee you are subject to a whole string of regulations concerning payroll, tax calculations, tax deductions, holiday payments, national insurance contributions, laws regarding employees who get certain allowances, and a whole lot more. If you run a garden services business, for instance, it is very likely that you don’t want to have to understand all this “stuff” that is suddenly your responsibility, and very likely have to sit there scratching your head late into the night while you try to work out who gets paid what, when you have to complete returns, how to calculate the amount of tax each employee should pay, and ensuring that it all gets to HMRC when it should do, if you don’t want to be for the proverbial “chop”.

This is why many employers prefer to hand all that business over to us at Pay Check so that they can get on with what they do best and expand their business, while leaving all the donkeywork to us. Our online payroll services in the UK are used by thousands of businesses for precisely that reason, and we run payroll for new businesses with one employee and for others that employ a thousand or more.

It may seem strange to you, but at the Pay Check team, we enjoy what we do. We love to get to grips with all of the different legislation, make sense of it, and devise and run programmes to produce the perfect payroll for our clients. After all, you are in business to make money and enjoy what you do, not to dance to the government’s tune.

Of course, as your business grows you are going to take on more employees and that means more work time spent on trying to sort out things that don’t make you any money. There are only so many hours in the working week after all, and you don’t want to be spending more and more of them poring over “the books”. That is totally unproductive. It is not just unproductive: it is a cost, and that is the opposite of productive.

In much the same way, you will have an office cleaner for your business because you don’t want to have to start doing it yourself at 5.30 when all your staff have gone home.

Even though you may use us to produce your payroll, the legal position is that, as the employer, you are still responsible for it being correct and in accordance with all the legislation. This is one very good reason for using our services, because our job is to get it right. That is what we are here for and it is what we do. And it is why over 95% of our clients come from recommendation by others.