Mar 2022
22
BrightPay 2022/23 is Now Available. What's New?
BrightPay 2022/23 is now available (for new customers and existing customers).
Over the past year, we have continued to focus the majority of our development efforts on bringing a version of BrightPay to the cloud, which we plan an announcement on soon. But work on BrightPay for Windows and macOS continues. Here’s an overview of what’s new in 2022/23:
2022/23 Tax Year Updates
- There are no changes to tax bands and rates for 2022/23 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. For Scottish tax codes, the bands have been updated for 2022/23. The emergency tax code remains the same as it was in 2021/22.
- 2022/23 employee and employer National Insurance contribution rates, thresholds and calculations, including:
- Support for new Veterans NIC
- Support for new Freeports NIC
- Support for Mariners NIC
- 2022/23 Student Loan and Postgraduate Loan thresholds.
- 2022/23 Statutory Sick Pay rates.
- 2022/23 rates and average weekly earnings thresholds for Statutory Maternity Pay, Statutory Adoption Pay, Statutory Paternity Pay, Statutory Shared Parental Pay and Statutory Parental Bereavement Pay.
- 2022/23 rates and calculations for company cars, vans and fuel.
- Ability to process 2022/23 HMRC coding notices.
- April 2022 National Minimum/Living Wage rates.
- Eligible employers can continue to claim Employment Allowance which can be used to reduce Employer Class 1 Secondary NICs payments to HMRC.
- Updated P11, P45, P60, P30, P32, P11D and PBIK forms.
- Updated RTI submissions in line with the latest HMRC specifications. BrightPay continues to be officially HMRC Recognised for all submission types (FPS, EPS, NVR, EXB, CIS300, CISREQ).
- 1.25% Health and Social Care Levy note appears by default on payslips, as requested by HMRC. It can be turned off if need be.
- BrightPay 2022/23 version 22.1 (released on 24/03/2022) also contains the following updates announced in the 2022 Spring Statement:
- Increase to the National Insurance Primary Threshold for Class 1 NICs.
- Annual Employment Allowance limit increased to £5,000.
Automatic Enrolment Updates
- 2022/23 qualifying earnings thresholds.
- For 2022/23, the minimum required pension contribution level continues to be 8%, at least 3% of which must be contributed by the employer.
- Various enrolment/contributions API submission and CSV formats have been updated to the latest versions to ensure continued compatibility with all pension scheme providers.
BrightPay (for Windows) is now 64-bit
BrightPay for Windows is now a 64-bit application. This does not make any difference to the experience of using BrightPay or its functionality, but it comes with a few nice optimisations:
- 64-bit apps just run better on 64-bit versions of Windows (which our telemetry shows us nearly 95% of our customers are using).
- 64-bit apps are able to access more computer memory than 32-bit apps can. This means that BrightPay will more smoothly handle employer files with a very large number of employees, which for certain operations can see memory spikes.
A 32-bit version of BrightPay for Windows will continue to be made available for those who need it.
(This does not affect BrightPay for macOS, which has always natively supported 64-bit Macs where applicable.)
Other New Features and Updates in 2022/23
- Support for manual journal entries. This can be used to account for things like Employment Allowance or recovered statutory pay in journals, as well as anything else.
- Improves handling of employee payment/bank details – changes to details now automatically apply across the whole tax year, meaning that finalised payslips no longer need to be re-opened first.
- The user interface for finalising and re-opening payslips now uses progress bars.
- Several additional minor improvements throughout the entire BrightPay user interface, as well as the latest bug fixes and security improvements.
Includes all updates made to BrightPay during the 2021/22 tax year
Here's a quick reminder of some of the main areas of improvement:
- Ability to pay employees, subcontractors, or HMRC using Modulr.
- Supports the latest UK and London Living Wage rates, announced in November 2021.
- Various improvements to validation and on-screen guidance to aid data accuracy and quality.
- Support for additional Automatic Enrolment pension scheme providers.
- Support for posting payroll journals to additional accounting software providers.
What's Next?
We're continually at work on the next version of BrightPay, developing new features and making any required fixes and improvements. See our release notes to keep track of what has been changed to date at any time.
