We’ve rolled out new payroll updates

We’re excited to let our Practice Partners know that we’ve released updates to spruce up our payroll functionality. You can now use FreeAgent to automatically calculate your clients’ pension contributions and export a breakdown of the figures that have been sent to HMRC, or a summary of the money due to HMRC.

We know that many of you have been saying for a long time that you’d find these features useful, so we’ve added support for the following:

  1. Automatically calculating the pension contribution amounts in each employee’s payroll profile
  2. Exporting a breakdown of the figures that have been sent to HMRC for the selected pay period
  3. Exporting a breakdown of the money due to HMRC, and the pay and deductions for all relevant employees included on the payroll

These updates will save you valuable time when preparing your clients’ payroll and help support your clients who have more sophisticated accounting needs. Being able to export a breakdown of the figures submitted to HMRC and money due will help ensure the correct data has been submitted for each client.

Previously, pension contribution amounts had to be calculated manually in each employee’s payroll profile which could be time-consuming, and the data submitted to HMRC couldn’t be downloaded. 

Here are the details.

Automatically calculate the pension contributions

When you’re creating a payroll profile in FreeAgent, you can now choose to let FreeAgent automatically calculate the pension contribution amounts.

Once you’ve entered the relevant details, such as the contribution basis, contribution type, employee and employer pension contributions and pensionable pay, FreeAgent will automatically calculate the contribution amounts. 

You can find out more about how FreeAgent’s automatic pension contribution calculation works and how to set up default pension contribution settings for any new employees, in our Knowledge Base.

Export a breakdown of the figures that have been sent to HMRC

You can now download a PDF of the figures that have been sent to HMRC for the selected pay period.

The .PDF file will include the Full Payment Submission (FPS) which notified HMRC of any updates to the pay or tax for the employees, and the Employer Payment Summary (EPS) which notified HMRC whether or not the Employment Allowance was being claimed.

Export a breakdown of the money due to HMRC

You can now download a .XLSX or .PDF file containing a breakdown of the money due to HMRC, and the pay and deductions for all relevant employees included on the payroll for that month, as well as the year-to-date totals.

These figures are provided in two sections, the first summarising the chosen month and the second presenting year-to-date values as of that month.