Advantages of Payroll Software In Small Businesses

I have to say that now RTI is with us even small businesses will be unable to file their statutory returns without some form of software, even if it is the PAYE Basic Tools system, it still needs software.

If you reduce the salaries/directors fees below the thresholds then you dont actually have a payroll and HMRC will require the PAYE scheme to be shut down. You could still run a payroll to provide the journal through to GL but this would be a very small business so why go to that bother?

The main concern many of us have is the requirement to have a payroll simply to comply with HMRC's new reporting requirements and nothing else. Many of us have been using spreadsheets for our clients and running payroll calculations once a year because all these worksheets do is provide a value to transfer to the DLA each month to fund the drawings they make so the software is like using a nuclear weapon to solve a domestic dispute and that is irritating to say the least. The cost makes it beyond irritating because at my practice we have worked out that the cost of acquiring and setting it up will take over five years to recover given that in most cases we cannot charge any more to the client - a result of HMRC telling everyone they were going to save millions by using RTI!

So software is a must, even for small businesses, the free versions are good but we found them too limiting and difficutl to use to be of much use to us, the PAYE Basic Tools, well the least said about it the better but overall you have to have it but make sure the actual choice is based on sound business lines and not jsut a knee jerk reaction to HMRC's deamnds.

Payrollpro