Ideas Portal
When creating the pay schedules for clients who pay on the same date (i.e. 25th of the month, 28th of the month etc) there is an option called "same date - working day" which will amend the pay date to a previous working day if the payment date falls on the weekend however sadly this is not fit for purpose and cannot be used as it also changes the payment date provided on the FPS to HMRC.
As per the below link, HMRC state that “You must enter the usual date that you pay your employees, even if you pay them earlier or later. For example, if you pay your employees early because your usual payday falls on a Bank Holiday, you should still enter your regular payday”. So when the contractual pay date falls on a Sunday, even though you make payment on the Friday, the date on the FPS submission must still be the contractual pay date (Sunday) https://www.gov.uk/running-payroll/reporting-to-hmrc
As there is no field for the regular/contractual pay date to be submitted, when using the same date - working day setting, the FPS submitted by Staffology to HMRC reflects this adjusted working day pay date. This means that if we use this feature the FPS submission is wrong, and this can have quite big implications on other areas such as Universal Credit.
To use the same date - working day option, there needs to be an additional field for the contractual pay date to be entered and this needs to be the field linked to the FPS so that an earlier payment date does not affect the reported pay date to HMRC.
Based on the importance of accurate HMRC reporting, I would say this is an area that needs addressing fairly urgently.
Hi Izzy, we are checking the XML and that is how we have identified the issue. Your example below is not relevant to the above as LWD has it's own setting. I am referring to the setting "same date - working day" - can you explain to me in what scenario that this would be used as we can't think of one (due to the fact that it changes the date for RTI) but this is the setting we are being encouraged to use by support.
This setting would be incredibly useful if it fixed the RTI date to the same date and it was only the payment date that was changed to the working day as it would save having to manually change the payment date on the payroll tab. I imagine this is perhaps what was intended by this option.
Hey Jennefer - If you check the actual XML it will display the correct date. For example, for a payment date in LWD in November -
and the FPS XML will display 