A report about Universal Credit, published last week, highlights how an employer’s choice of pay dates can still have unintended consequences for the staff. The report, from the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), states that, “The strict system of monthly assessment of earnings can cause a host of problems as months do not all include the same number of paydays”.
Read more “Universal Credit Still Can’t Cope with Real Pay Dates”Passwords have two main purposes: (1) to make it easy for an authorised person to log on to the system and (2) to make it hard for an unauthorised person to gain access to your account. If the password isn’t written down or stored in a password manager, a good password needs to be easy to remember (to meet the first purpose) and hard to guess (to meet the second purpose). A lot of passwords are good for one of these purposes but not the other and it is important to keep this in mind when choosing a password.
Read more “What’s Easy to Remember but Hard to Guess? A Good Password”VAT is being ‘made digital’ this year and HMRC plans to give income tax and corporation tax the same treatment in the future. But what does it mean to make a tax digital?
Read more “Making Tax Digital”When Real Time Information was first introduced, one of the surprising limitations was that, if employers didn’t send details of all wage payments within two weeks of the end of the tax year, HMRC would start automatically rejecting them. HMRC has now confirmed that this is going to change in April 2019.
Read more “Filing after the End of the Tax Year”January is an important month in the calendar year and in the self-assessment timetable, but it isn’t that special for payroll.
Read more “Happy New Year”Back in August, the Child Poverty Action Group flagged up a problem caused by the interaction between an employer’s choice of pay dates and their employee’s entitlement to universal credit. Although the recent budget did include some changes to universal credit, this particular problem wasn’t addressed. So, what can employers do about it?
The company behind AccountingWEB, a popular website for accountants, has completed its 2018 survey into the opinions of people who use accounting software. After each survey, an award is given to the best software product in each category. However, this year, the awards were a little different from usual.
We sometimes get enquiries from people who are self employed, asking about setting up a payroll, but the truth is, most of them don’t need it.
Universal Credit is a monthly payment that is replacing six benefits, including Working Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. It gives essential support for people who need it, including those in low paid jobs. However, the way it is calculated makes it highly sensitive to the exact dates when the worker is paid. As a result, employers choosing certain pay patterns can inadvertently make life very difficult for staff who receive Universal Credit.
We have owned the trade mark ‘The Payroll Site’ for ten years now. Companies choose to protect their brand names for different reasons, but, in our case, it was prompted when a competitor did something very cheeky.
