As the Academy Awards demonstrated this week, things don’t always go to plan. On 15th December, Scotland’s finance secretary Derek Mackay delivered the draft budget for 2017/18, in which he proposed a higher rate tax threshold of £43,430. In Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, government budget declarations don’t carry the weight of an executive order but must be agreed by a vote of the relevant parliament, where the best-laid plans of mice and ministers go oft awry.
1) If a worker is eligible you must enrol them (even if they protest)
There are some limited exceptions to this but generally the law requires you to work out which staff to enrol and then do it, even if they don’t want a pension. They can then opt out after you’ve enrolled them.
We have added an option to send data to the Smart Pension API. This means if you use our system for payroll and Smart Pension for your auto enrolment pension, you can transfer information across by pushing a button on our site.
This article was originally published on our old blog in 2012, but it is still true and worth repeating.
We normally operate two complete systems in different datacentres. The first one serves our customers and the second replicates all of the data, in real time, and is standing by to take over. If a disaster strikes the first location, the service is quickly switched to the second system.
On the 25th January, many of us with a claim to Scottish ancestry use the birthday of Robert Burns as an excuse to join friends for some poetry and to eat haggis with neeps and tatties. I had a Scottish great-grandfather, making me Scottish up to the ankles, if not the shins. You may, like me, be a fraction Scottish but as far as your Income Tax is concerned, it’s either Scottish, or it isna.
With the introduction of auto enrolment, employers of all sizes have been compelled to choose pension schemes for their staff. In doing so, they are making a financial choice that affects the long term interests of their employees.
Around this time of year, lots of small business owners are doing their self assessment tax returns – in case you haven’t heard, the deadline is 31st January.
Often, even in simple cases with no other income, the self-assessment calculation comes out a pound or two different from the figures on the P60. In week 53 cases (which I’ll explain later) the difference can be significantly higher. The obvious question is, which is right?
Customer service is central to what we do. If I was using a payroll system and I hit a problem working out the wages, I’d expect to get help to resolve that problem pretty quickly. In my opinion, everyone should expect that, including our customers. That’s the reason we include telephone support in our price, rather than making it an optional extra.
I am a member of the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP). Like most professional associations, it runs training courses and keeps its members updated with the latest industry news.
In the past, we’ve kept our views quiet and let our work speak for itself. Naturally, some customers want to know a bit more about us and why we make the choices we do, so this new blog is a place for topics not strictly related to getting your payroll done.
