Every year, the payroll industry faces new challenges and 2017/18 has been no different.
From the usual annual changes such as tax codes and payroll thresholds through to brand new processes for Apprenticeship Levy, Off-Payroll Working for Public Sector and Gender Pay Gap reporting, payroll legislation changes have certainly kept the teams at PayStream busy.
In 2017/18 the legislation changes were published quite late in the day by the Government due to pre-election purdah this also resulted in the Finance Act being cut down from 762 pages to just 140, so we are expecting some of the proposed changes in the Act that didn't quite make it in to 2017/18 to follow in the next tax year. Our relationships with HMRC, Professional Passport, law firms and the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals means we are kept up to date with legislation and payroll policy news as and when they happen.
Once the legislation is published, our legal team will review it to see what it means for our sector and the impact on our business. The next step is to write an IT specification document for our IT Team to build the software changes which are then firstly released into a test environment, before going live.
On top of this we are running (on average) 46,400 payslips per month which is by no means an easy feat. All the teams work extremely hard behind the scenes to ensure our contractor payments are not only timely but also accurate.
The payroll industry annually celebrates not only the impact of payroll on business, but also the contribution that payroll makes to the UK economy. Especially as taxable income accounts for nearly half of all taxable revenues through the £533bn total tax revenue paid to the government, with £169bn collected through income tax and £113bn through national insurance contributions. Payrollers are also responsible for over 160 pieces of payroll legislation as set by the Government.
So between 5th - 9th September PayStream will be celebrating the hard work and dedication of our payroll teams by running some events. Please keep your eyes peeled for updates on our social media channels.