Paying salaries to employees and directors

Payroll works by Provestor generating payslips every month for your directors or employees. Tax, national insurance and student loans deductions are calculated by the software and the money is set aside by your company. Each quarter, a payment to HMRC is made by your company.

Payroll is reported to HMRC each pay period. Provestor software is connected to HMRC directly and your payslips are submitted electronically using the HMRC Real Time Information (RTI) system.

Registering as an employer

Before you can pay salaries you will need to register with HMRC as an employer. A Pay As You Earn (PAYE) scheme will be setup by HMRC allowing you to start running payroll. 

Managing your payroll

Once your Account Manager has set-up your PAYE scheme in Provestor, you'll be able to configure your employees payroll.

Payroll is a repetitive cycle, in other words you will carry out the same procedure each month. A week before your pay date we will send you an email to remind you to check your payslips. You should check salary payments and reimbursement of mileage and expenses for each individual on your payroll.

The basics of using Provestor payroll are:

1. Preview your payslips

To preview your company’s payslips, click to open your Payroll. You’ll see a message about your next payroll date. Click on the button Preview payslip to preview your upcoming payslips.

It is here that you can check and if necessary, edit salary and expense payments to your directors and employees.

2. Set or amend salaries

The salary can be split into three components; basic salary, bonus and overtime. All three types of pay are treated the same for tax purposes, but the split is available for your internal reporting and also to assist your employee in understanding what he or she has been paid.

A salary is typically a regular, repeatable payment. You can edit a salary by clicking on the pencil next to the salary where you’ll be presented with three options:

1. Regular salary – Here you enter their annual salary and Provestor will automatically calculate how much to pay them on each payslip depending upon the number of paydays you have. Note: when you change an employee’s salary it will update all future payslips. 

2. Temporarily change their salary – This option is useful if you need to make a temporary adjustment to pay but do not wish to change the stated annual salary. For example, you may wish to suspend payment for a period of time or indeed indefinitely. If you need to do this, the system will provide you with an option to select to apply the change as a one-off (i.e. apply it only to the next payslip), apply it to a specified number of payslips, or apply it until you choose to remove the change (e.g. to suspend salary payments indefinitely).

3. Skip payment - You can also choose to skip their salary payment altogether

Bonus and overtime
You can choose to pay your employees a bonus or overtime at any time by clicking on the pencil icon. As with salaries, you have the option as to how long you wish to make the payment for. For example, it may be a one off annual bonus or in contrast, an overtime arrangement where you have agreed to extra pay for a period of weeks or months. 

3. Reimbursing mileage and expenses

You can choose to repay personally incurred expenses to your employees that have been entered in the Expenses screen as well as journeys recorded in the mileage log.

To do so, simply click on the relevant pencil icon. You must choose whether you wish to automatically repay all expenses and mileage to a given employee, or to manually select those items you wish to repay.

It’s also possible to use a combination of the two methods. It is possible to choose an alternative employee to repay other expenses.

If you set an employee to be repaid either expenses or mileage automatically, the repayments will be recalculated on the date that the payslips are created. This means that the preview of the payslips during this process may differ from the payslips that are actually issued. This would occur for example, if you enter additional expenses into Provestor after previewing the payslips.

4. Pay day

Once pay day arrives, the Provestor software will automatically create payslips for your employees based on the information you have provided.

With a PAYE scheme, information must be submitted electronically to HMRC each payday using Real Time Information (RTI). Our software takes care of your RTI submissions for you.

Before you can pay your employees, HMRC need to confirm they have received and accepted your payslips that are sent by RTI. We will send you an email to confirm this and let you know that you can pay salaries.

Making salary and expense payments

Once your payslips have been issued, you must then pay your employees. The email from us referenced in the section above details the payments that you need to make. Alternatively, you can also see a list of payments on your company’s dashboard and also in the pending payments at the bottom of the bookkeeping screen.

You need to transfer the net amount referenced in the payment record from your business bank account to the personal bank account of the individual. Remember to give each employee a copy of their payslip.

Once you’ve paid your employees, mark the transaction as paid during your normal bookkeeping activities.

Payslips

You can click on each person on your payroll and use the option to export a PDF of their payslip. You must supply your employees a copy for their records. 

Paying HMRC income tax and national insurance

You need to make regular payments to HMRC for:

1. Income tax deducted

2. National Insurance deducted

3. Student Loan repayments

Payments are normally made each quarter and we will send you an email when your company needs to make a payment.