Process dates, paying employees and HMRC

Question

Hello all, 
 I&rsquo;ve never worked in payroll before &ndash; I have zero prior knowledge or experience &ndash; but since I&rsquo;m in need of a career change, I&rsquo;ve been looking into the possibility of becoming a payroll assistant. Over the past month I&rsquo;ve been ploughing my way through the Sage 50Cloud Payroll eLearning courses and webinars &ndash; they&rsquo;re really good and I&rsquo;ve picked up a lot - but there are a few things I just can&rsquo;t seem to get my head around&hellip; If someone can provide clarity on the following, I&rsquo;ll be greatly appreciative (apologies in advance if I don&rsquo;t explain myself very well): 
 
 As an example, if employees are usually paid on the last day of the month, and that day/date happens to be the 31 st but it&rsquo;s a bank holiday Monday, I believe that means that whilst I would set the process date to the 31 st , I would actually submit my FPS and pay the employees on Friday the 28 th , as that&rsquo;s the nearest banking day. Assuming I&rsquo;ve got this right so far, my question is, if those employees happen to work on the Saturday, Sunday or bank holiday Monday (as many industries do), what happens to their pay for those days &ndash; the process date will look like I&rsquo;ve included up to the 31 st , when actually they got paid on the 28 th . Does the payroll software pick this up and automatically include those days' wages in the next FPS?

I&rsquo;ve watched the tutorials and webinars a number of times now, and the bit I don&rsquo;t seem to recall being covered too much is the actual paying process. E.G. let&rsquo;s assume I&rsquo;ve done my pre process tasks, entered payments, submitted my FPS, etc&hellip; do I then click on &lsquo;e-banking&rsquo; from the payroll nav and that&rsquo;s the point at which the employees physically receive pay into their bank accounts? (In other words, they would receive their payslip before the money is actually in their accounts, seeing as issuing payslips happens a few steps prior, in pre update reporting???)

When it&rsquo;s time to pay HMRC what they&rsquo;re owed (by the 22 nd of the month), do I make that payment in the collector of taxes tab in the e-submissions nav?

Many thanks, 
 DanW8

Robert N · Accepted Answer

Disclaimer: this is how I understand things having taken over payroll and searched for answers. Always check with the relevant authorities 
 The process date is the date up to which the payees are paid as far as Sage Payroll is concerned It is important to get this date correct as it can affect benefits employees receive (in our case I noticed it with automatically calculated SMP). If you set your processing date as 31st and actually run the payroll on 28th then Sage payroll will pay employees up to 31st. If you need to process extra payments for some employees for working on 31st you could either wait until 1st to process their pay (with the process date still set at the previous 31st - see https://www.gov.uk/running-payroll/fps-after-payday ) or pay them for the normal month and add the extra pay onto the following month (probably a more normal practice of having a cut-off date for expenses/overtime claims (set prior to the actual payroll run date which itself would be prior to the process date) which if missed just means they get paid a month later, but it does make running the payroll easier and smoother). 
 HMRC is, I think, aware of the issue regarding non-banking days for normal pay days and allows for actual payment to be before or on the next physical banking day (see, for example, https://www.cipp.org.uk/resources/news/rp-normal-payday-falls-on-non-banking-day.html ). 
 With regard to e-banking, when I do ours I can specify the actual date that the payments will be made. We normally run our payroll a few days before the actual pay day (specifying the pay day as the processing date) and send our the payslips then. With e-banking I set the payments to go out on our pay date (or last previous banking day if the pay date is a non-banking day) and upload the created file to our bank for processing. 
 To pay HMRC we do a payment from our online banking access (keying in the appropriate amount) giving it the necessary reference (xxxPHxxxxxxxYYMM) so that the payment is attached to the correct liability. We don't use the e-Submissions->Collector of Taxes; however it looks like it creates a file for import just like the employee payments (see: https://gb-kb.sage.com/portal/app/portlets/results/viewsolution.jsp?solutionid=200427112159753&hypermediatext=null ).

Sage 50 Payroll

Process dates, paying employees and HMRC

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