More and More Businesses Are Outsourcing Their Payroll
Over the last few years, many businesses in the UK have begun to outsource their payroll. This is partly because in 2013 HMRC introduced RTI – Real time Information – to the PAYE system. What this means for employers is that every time they pay an employee, they must submit reports and tax deductions, rather than the way it was previously which was just at the end of the financial year. Suddenly, for all practical purposes, businesses were hit with doing the job 12 times a year instead of just once.
As you can imagine, this instantly made payroll a far more time-consuming and complicated job. Thus, many businesses started to come to us to tackle their payroll solutions in the UK rather than doing it all in-house. And this is not just happening in the UK but across other countries as well. One recent survey by a well-known accountancy firm found that in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, some 47% of all businesses were outsourcing their payroll completely. Furthermore, most businesses today outsource some parts of their payroll even if not all of it.
At Pay Check, we can take over all of your payroll or only part of it, as you wish. We can calculate your taxes and other things such as maternity leave and handle all your record-keeping, leaving you free to do what you do best and what you should be doing, which is expanding your business. This has become even more important since we have had Covid-19, as you have plenty of other things on your plate besides worrying about HMRC.
Of course, your payroll problems as an employer are a direct reflection of the size of your business and the number of employees that you have. For example, some companies may have a sufficient number of employees to make it seem worthwhile to employ an in-house payroll manager to look after everything. This means that the individual that they hire needs to be totally trustworthy and reliable. He or she will have access to a lot of confidential information. In that connection, at Pay Check we are ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and BACS approved, which means that we operate to the strictest standards in the industry. We have been assessed as safe, secure, and of the highest level of trustworthiness.
However, hiring your own in-house payroll manager can also bring with it other problems. For instance, what happens if your manager suffers from illness or accident and is off work for several weeks? Or if he just gets offered another job and accepts it, giving you four weeks’ notice? Your staff still needs to be paid on time, and HMRC is not likely to be all that concerned about your problems. Neither is your former payroll manager.
Smaller businesses may have other issues. Perhaps you simply do not have enough staff to warrant employing a full-time payroll manager, so you have to have other staff members handle the payroll as a smaller part of their overall responsibilities. That also means that they have to be trained in exactly how to handle it, together with all the rules and regulations that go with it. Furthermore, they will also have to keep up to date with all of the ever-changing legislation.
There is no doubt that some employers may have concerns about security when it comes to payroll. This is because the responsibility for submitting the correct information is always that of the employer, even if he is outsourcing the work. Any fines thus incurred are also payable by the employer.
However, as regards that, when you use an in-house manager he or she may very well not have the experience that all of our people at Pay Check have, and in fact, if that is the case, there is more chance of an error being made in-house than if using us.
It is true that by outsourcing your payroll to us you are sharing your employees’ personal information with us, such as National Insurance numbers for instance. In theory, this could put them at the risk of fraud. However, at Pay Check we put your security at the forefront of everything we do because our business depends on it. We have as much interest in safeguarding your data as you do. Furthermore, we continually invest in the latest technology for that very reason, and work with an external data compliance auditor to ensure total GDPR compliance.