Some Of The Many Errors We See On Internal Payroll Calculations
There are many reasons to outsource your payroll when you are a small or medium sized business. A major reason being the number of fines that HMRC can dish out when you get things wrong – and it is easy to make mistakes. At PayCheck, the following are just some of the common errors we have seen recently:
- Directors set up incorrectly as employees
- Wrong SMP information given
- Employment Allowance not claimed or wrongly claimed
- Not informing HMRC of leavers in the current year
- Tax codes not uplifted for the current year
- Pensions being calculated incorrectly re tax relief, e.g. pre-tax when it should be post-tax or the other way around.
- Pensions being calculated on full salary when it should be on qualified earnings only
- Incorrect pay submissions to HMRC
- Pay components set up incorrectly
- Non-filing penalties, fines etc.
- Incorrect annual payrolls run for Director only businesses
- Incorrect treatment of CIS
- Claim of Employment Allowance had been wrong; the company was deemed to be in a group therefore should not have claimed
- NHS pension contributions were being incorrectly calculated
- Pension scheme set up incorrectly leading to under deduction of contributions across 2 tax years. Previously reported to the Pension Regulator as contributions had not been uploaded to the Pension provider
- Unable to add a payroll to TPR for re-declaration
There are more, but you can see how easy it is to make mistakes. That is because payroll is complicated, which is why many SMEs prefer to use our payroll services in London because we are specialists in what we do, and we very rarely make any mistakes like the aforementioned ones listed above. Any rare mistakes we do make are dealt with swiftly and rectified immediately.
Let’s face it: you are specialists in what you do in your business, which is why your customers come to you. You cannot be expected to be an expert in PAYE, yet that is what you need to be if you are not going to make these mistakes and suffer from fines as a result. The fines can add up to a lot, especially if HMRC thinks that you are making errors and then deliberately hiding them: you can end up in jail for seven years!
It is not just that payroll is complicated, but it is the amount of time that you have to spend on it which could be spent on building and strengthening your business. Whether you do it in-house or outsource and use our payroll services in London, it is costing you money. It is very likely to cost you a lot less to use our services rather than doing it in-house, and you get something extra with them as well - peace of mind! For many people that is invaluable.
In a small business it is often you – the boss/owner/employer – who has to undertake payroll, but even if you employ someone else to do it you still have to pay their salary. However, the issue for so many businesses is that there is insufficient payroll to take on an employee solely to take care of it, so what happens is that another employee has to be taken away from their duties and trained on how to do the payroll, perhaps for just one or two days a week. This is a big reason why errors creep in, because that employee is not a specialist and no matter how attentive they are, there will be things that they may not fully understand.
Whether you have been considering outsourcing your payroll or not, there is some food for thought.