iTrent Tips for Payroll Week

National Payroll Week was established in the UK by the CIPP in 1998 to celebrate the payroll profession and give it the recognition it deserves. The week is designed to demonstrate the impact the payroll industry has in the UK through the collection of income tax and National Insurance, which is expected to contribute in the region of £325.7bn to the UK economy in 2020/21.

This year more than ever the payroll profession, like others, have been tested to their extremes. They have been identified as employees that are vitally needed for essential financial services provision, namely keeping the UK paid!

Here at MHR, we recognise the hard work payroll professionals perform to support their organisations. We want to ensure our customers are getting the most value out of iTrent to help them carry out their crucial tasks, so we’ve put together 9 handy tips you may not know about to ensure iTrent is giving you the best possible support.

1. If you don't have your payrolls configured to automatically change the National Insurance (NI) category of employees when they reach one of the age thresholds (21/25 or State Pension Age), you should consider turning the facility on. One of the major causes of NI contributions being incorrect is the failure to change the category at the appropriate time. The flags you need can be found on the payroll-level Legislation details page, for UK payrolls.

2. On a similar note, if you have people paid at Minimum/Living Wage levels, do you have iTrent configured to change the rate automatically when one of the age thresholds is reached? A common cause of inadvertent breaches of the law is failure to increase pay at the correct point when an employee passes one of the thresholds. What you need to do in order to achieve this will depend on your configuration so you may need help from Professional Services to make this change.

3. Did you know that you can configure iTrent to send employee address details on every FPS rather than just for new starters and employees with no NI number? Doing this is voluntary, but it helps ensure that your employees are on the correct basis of Income Tax (Scottish, Welsh or Rest of UK). The flag to turn this feature on is at Organisation level, on the Organisation preference details page.

4. Did you know that most of the routine paperwork you need to send to employees (payslips, P60s and P45s) can be supplied electronically by iTrent, via email or Employee self-service? If you still provide any of these on paper, switching to electronic delivery saves you time and money, while making the information easier for employees to access. If you're interested in this, a good starting point is the User Guide which is available on Service Cloud.

5. If you still produce P11Ds, have you considered 'payrolling' benefits-in-kind instead? This involves deducting the tax on the benefits throughout the tax year via PAYE. Doing this could save you a lot of effort – how long do you spend on the annual P11D exercise? The employees benefit by paying their tax in real-time rather than getting a tax code adjustment part-way through each tax year to reflect the previous year's benefits, so it's easier for them to manage their finances. You still pay the Class 1A NI in the usual way, after the end of the tax year. You can only switch to payrolling at the beginning of a tax year, but you need to start planning soon if you're interested in doing so from next April. iTrent supports 'payrolling': what you need to do in order to implement it will depend on the types of benefit-in-kind you offer, so you may need help from Professional Services to make this change.

6. Did you know you can configure iTrent so that when you attach a T&C to a person, it can automatically generate elements for processing by payroll? This can be a cash value or a value from a payment table. See section A3 of the iTrent Organisation and Structure Management Guide for more details.

7. Did you know that when a person leaves, you can automatically pay/deduct remaining holiday entitlement in the period in which the person receives their last payment? If you think this feature may be of use to you, see section 18 of the iTrent Absence Guide.

8. Did you know a person can download all of their payslips into a single multi-page PDF? To do this they need to click the Search & Download button in the Payslips section in Self-service, search for their required date range and then click the Download button when the search results are displayed.

9. Finally, have you considered whether you can benefit from any of the new modules which have been introduced into iTrent in recent times? Things like managing TOIL and Flexi arrangements or holiday buy/sell with automatic creation of payroll adjustments? If you think these might benefit your organisation, your Customer Relationship Manager will be happy to provide more details or organise a demonstration of what iTrent can do!