Gary Ging, Sage Payroll Team (enjoying a Newcastle summer)

Online filing

This used to be a laborious task of having to produce two copies of the P14 form for every employee who worked for you during the year and the P35, which summarises all of the information on the P14s. This was all mailed in the post to HMRC (at the employer’s cost) or you went to your local tax office to deliver it personally. And don’t forget that you also have to give a P60, on paper, to all of your employees still employed by you at the end of the year.

The introduction of online filing has changed the way in which employers can send this information to HMRC and this year was the first year in which all employers, with a few exceptions, were required to submit their year end information online. Not only is this much easier than printing lots of paper work (it’s now just a couple of mouse clicks) but it gives you an immediate response from HMRC to tell you that they have received the information and if everything was ok or not.

How did we do?

We recently received our annual Vendor Report from HMRC detailing how our payroll products performed over the 2009/10 on-line filing period and we were once again very happy with the figures – 436,104 successful employer submissions for a total of 7,218,432 P14s.

Since the introduction of on-line filing we have always exceeded the previous year figures but the most pleasing aspect of the latest report is that it’s not just about the quantity of submissions but also the quality.

The Vendor Report doesn’t just tell us how many successful submissions were made using Sage Payroll software but also how many were unsuccessful, and this year there were 661. No, that isn’t a typo – out of 436,765 submission attempts there were only 661 failures.

This gives us a 99.85% success rate, which I think is pretty phenomenal considering the number of submissions made. And whilst 661 submission attempts were unsuccessful, this does not mean that 661 employers who use our products were not able to submit at all – our submission data shows that these employers did make a successful submission after correcting the original problem.

And I don’t refer to the number of failed submissions as ‘only 661’. We believe that this number is too high and so we have already set ourselves a target of improving these numbers for next year – not only on the number of submissions but we’re going for a 100% first time success rate.

On a final note, HMRC have changed their regulations and so from the 2010/11 year end it will be possible to give your employees their P60 electronically. Within Sage Payroll this will mean that you can either continue to print them on paper or email them directly to your employees, complete with password protection.

Gary Ging, Sage Payroll Team