Mar 2014
24
BrightPay 14/15 is Now Available. What's New?
BrightPay 14/15 is now available to download. Here’s a quick overview of what’s new:
2014/15 Budget Changes
- 2014/15 PAYE thresholds
- 2014/15 National Insurance contributions rates and thresholds
- 2014/15 Student Loan threshold
- 2014/15 Statutory payments rates and thresholds
- The emergency tax code has changed from 944L to 1000L.
- Eligible employers can claim the new £2000 Employment Allowance which can be used to reduce Employer Class 1 Secondary NICs payments to HMRC.
- Retirement of the regional employer NICs holiday scheme
- Statutory Sick Pay is no longer recoverable
Automatic Enrolment
BrightPay 14/15 has complete functionality to enable you to automatically enrol your employees into a qualifying pension scheme:
- BrightPay allows you to record your automatic enrolment staging date. When the staging date has been reached, automatic enrolment functionality will automatically kick in.
- BrightPay will assess your employees, monitor eligibility criteria, and let you know:
- who must be enrolled into a qualifying scheme
- who has the right to opt in to be enrolled in a qualifying scheme
- who can request to join a pension scheme
- BrightPay walks you through all the various automatic enrolment processes:
- postponing assessment
- enrolling employees
- handling opt-ins and joining
- handling opt-outs and refunds
- BrightPay enables you to generate tailored communication letters and notices to employees
- BrightPay tracks records on a period by period basis, allowing you to see exactly what changes, actions and contributions are made throughout the year. You can produce custom reports with the exact information you require.
- BrightPay has dedicated support for the automatic enrolment qualifying pension scheme offered by the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST), allowing you to:
- set up your NEST scheme, group and payment sources
- create enrolment and contribution submission CSV files for uploading to NEST
- We plan to add dedicated support for other pension scheme providers, but for now BrightPay offers generic support for any automatic enrolment qualifying scheme which you can use in conjunction with BrightPay's built-in reporting tools to operate your scheme.
For more information on automatic enrolment, see our automatic enrolment blog or the guide for employers on The Pensions Regulator website.
Real Time Information (RTI)
This time last year we launched BrightPay 13/14 with full support for RTI.
In 14/15, there are some new features and improvements:
- From 2014/15, HMRC will be introducing penalties for late Full Payment Submissions (FPS). To help determine whether any late filing penalties are due, HMRC request that a late reporting reason be included with late submissions. BrightPay will detect when an FPS is late, and prompt you to select a reason.
- Support for the new FPS contracted hours worked per week bands
- Ability to set/change the Payroll ID for any employee (start of year or mid year)
- New Employment Allowance indicator on EPS
- Bank account information on EPS
- Improvements to the RTI interface in BrightPay, including the ability to view total amounts of the values in an FPS.
- We received feedback from HMRC about the most common data errors that occur in submissions from BrightPay customers, and so have made many improvements to prevent these from happening. For example:
- Improved wording on notifications
- Better validation at the data entry stage
- Forced UK data formats for users on non-English operating systems
- RTI messages and logs are now stored in a compressed format in your data file, which should greatly help to reduce file size.
BrightPay – New Features
With RTI and Automatic Enrolment, the last couple of years have seen many changes to UK payroll. This in turn has required a lot of supporting development to be done on BrightPay. So with these out of the way, we are excited to get back to adding unique features and making BrightPay the best payroll software on the market. Here are the new features we've completed for this first 14/15 release:
- Ability to add an addition (new or existing type) to multiple payslips at once
- Ability to add a deduction (new or existing type) to multiple payslips at once
- Ability to set a note on multiple payslips at once
- Ability to edit the FPS settings for multiple payslips at once
- Ability to record absence and strike on employee calendar
- Ability to record part day annual leave, unpaid leave, absence or strike on employee calendar
- Ability to print the employee calendar and overview of leave for one or multiple employees
- Ability to print a summary of company annual leave entitlement
- Ability to create a BrightPay employer file without a password (and remove the password from an existing file)
- Ability to see the most recent time a payslip was printed, emailed, or exported.
- Ability to import employee details from Bright Contracts
But that's not all – we've got some great plans for what's coming next. And like previous years, you won't have to wait until 15/16 – we'll be releasing new features to 14/15 users when they are ready. Watch this space!
Other Improvements in BrightPay 14/15
- Improved aesthetics (including graphics fixes for Windows 8 users).
- Performance enhancements – we've upgraded much of the core technology that powers BrightPay to the latest version, bringing with it faster and better number crunching.
- Minor user interface tweaks to make BrightPay even easier to use.
- Lots of minor bugs have been squashed.
BrightPay 14/15 will be the same price as BrightPay 13/14 (including FREE for small employers with up to three employees). Support will continue to be free of charge for all users.
