SimplePay Blog

April 22, 2021

Pandemic Unemployment Payment and Returning to Work

Monday 12 April 2021 was a day that gave cause for cautious optimism, as the Government began loosening restrictions and reopening the country. Provided COVID-19 numbers remain subdued over the coming months, many employees that have been relying on Pandemic Unemployment Payments (PUPs) since December 2020 can begin to return to work.

Our blog post today is aimed at informing you on the process and what is required of you and your employees when making this transition.

Returning to Work

The very first thing that your employee needs to do on the date that they return to work is close their PUP claim on the DEASP website.

Until this is done, the process to change the employee’s RPN cannot begin and so will result in them paying more tax. The process is as follows:

Your employee closes their PUP claim on the DEASP website.
DEASP will make the last PUP payment due to your employee, before closing the claim on their system and informing Revenue.
On receiving the information for DEASP, Revenue will update your employee’s tax credits in line with the amount received through PUP, before creating an updated RPN on a week 1 basis.

From the date your employee(s) close their PUP claim, it will take approximately two weeks before an updated week 1 RPN will be available. If your employees are paid weekly or fortnightly for these pay periods they will pay more tax, due to no tax credits being available on the RPN.

This is unfortunately an unavoidable feature of the transition, but there are some things that you as an employer can do to minimise the extra tax your employees will have to pay:

Encourage your employees to close their PUP claim on their first day back at work – this will get the process started.
Pull RPNs for your employees as close to the payment date as possible – this will maximise the chances of receiving an updated RPN for your employee(s), reflecting that they’ve returned to work.

Any overpayments of tax and/or USC will be reimbursed, but employees will need to wait for their Statement of Liability in 2022, meaning that it is better to use the updated information now if possible and save the wait.

NOTE: Overlap between PUP payments and first week back

The PUP system works as follows:

Friday of any given week: people enrolled for PUP are noted for payment in the following week.
Tuesday of the following week: PUP payments are made in accordance with the list of people collected on the Friday.

If your employee returns to work on a Monday and immediately closes their PUP claim, as they were still registered as unemployed on Friday they will still receive a PUP payment for their first week back at work. In other words the first week back they will receive both their salary and a PUP payment.

This is not an error so do not be concerned when this occurs. If you would like to learn more about the taxation of PUP for 2021 and the effect of returning to work, you can find out more on the Revenue page.

We hope that you have found the above information useful. If you have any questions on how the information above relates to SimplePay, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].

Equally, if you are not yet a client of SimplePay but would like to be, or if you’d like to know how we can take the effort out of filing and calculating payroll, get in contact with us or visit our website: www.simplepay.ie.

Keep well and stay safe.

Team SimplePay

March 25, 2021April 8, 2021

TWSS Reconciliation

As you’re likely aware, the Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme (TWSS) was introduced last year to help mitigate the adverse effects of the pandemic on employment. Affected employers could receive income support for their employees, helping avoid layoffs over the period that trade was restricted. A requirement to partaking in TWSS was that employers would need to carry out a reconciliation process after the scheme had reached completion. The first phase of this occurred in October 2020, where employers were required to submit reconciliation reports, as covered in our previous blog post.

This Monday (22 March 2021) the reconciliation window for TWSS opened. Between now and 30 June 2021 you will need to log into ROS, check the information recorded to be correct, make amendments if necessary, and submit your reconciliation.

If you haven’t already, you will receive a notification in your ROS inbox when your reconciliation information is available.

IMPORTANT: The deadline for completing the reconciliation is not until 30 June 2021. Before you review and accept your reconciliation balance on ROS, you need to read through Revenue’s guidance on the TWSS reconciliation to ensure that you complete it correctly. This provides a useful overview, as well as information on each key step of the reconciliation process.

In section 4 “How to review and correct subsidy paid data” we would recommend that you make any necessary amendments directly on ROS. This will immediately update your information to give you an up to date statement of account on submission.

Information about TWSS reconciliation can also be found in this Revenue Press Release, and in this Extensive Guide which covers the whole process in detail.

What Happens Next?

Whether or not you make any amendments to the amount of TWSS paid to your employees on ROS, Revenue will combine this information with any payments you have already made to issue you with a statement of account. This will show the amount that either you or Revenue owe to the other.

PRSI Corrections Post TWSS Reconciliation

The J9 PRSI class contributes to the number of insurable weeks of the last used non-J9 PRSI class. As a result, you’re unlikely to need to make any manual changes to the PRSI class.

However, where PRSI Class J9 was applied to your employees’ payslips and:

You opted out / reversed out of TWSS;
You were ineligible for TWSS;
One or more of your employees were ineligible for TWSS; or
Certain payslips were ineligible

then an adjustment may be required.

If Revenue has raised a PAYE or PRSI assessment with you for some or all of 26 March to 31 August 2020, then you should confirm with the caseworker whether you need to make any adjustments.

More information on changing PRSI classes on payslips for the TWSS period can be found here.

Useful Links

We hope that you have found the above information useful. If you have any questions on how the information above relates to SimplePay, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].

Keep well and stay safe.

Team SimplePay

January 20, 2021January 20, 2021

New Feature: Payslips Export

Being a SimplePay client means that you’re used to the benefits of a simple and efficient payroll system. But we’re always looking at ways to make your job even easier and faster. We heard your cries for a quicker way to download multiples payslips for an employee and are happy to announce that this is now available.

Our new Payslips Export report allows you to download a ZIP file with all the payslips within a specific date range for selected employees or pay points. For more information on how to generate this, head to our help article here.

This report makes the task of assisting employees with payslip requests much faster. Remember that employees also have the option to download payslips themselves using the self-service portal or app.

For any further questions, do not hesitate to contact our support team.

Not a SimplePay client? Want a payroll software provider that actually listens to their clients? Sign up for a free 30-day trial here to see just how simple payroll can be when using SimplePay.

Team SimplePay

January 20, 2021

New Feature: Give Admin and Leave Admin Users Read-only Access

Unlike many other payroll systems, SimplePay does not charge for or restrict the number of users on the system. This means that you can give system access to all the people that need it, whether this is a department head who approves leave, a payroll administrator who processes payroll or an external accountant who completes filing submissions. While our user settings already have a range of roles and restrictions that you can configure, we’ve had several requests for giving users read-only access to the system.

We are delighted to announce that we’ve upgraded our permissions to enable you to give users read-only access, with extensive flexibility that lets you customise this on a company, pay frequency or pay point level.

When adding a user, you can still select their permission role (e.g. Leave Admin) and restrict them to specific companies, pay frequencies or pay points. However, when restricting users with Admin or Leave Admin roles, you can select the type of access for each company, pay frequency or pay points, namely:

Full: gives the user full access to the areas of the system as defined by that particular role
Read-only: gives the user read-only access to the areas of the system as defined by that particular role
None: gives the user no access

For more information on setting up users with read-only access, refer to our help article here.

We hope that you love the new feature! Please reach out to us if you have any trouble setting up users or if you have any further questions.

Team SimplePay

January 12, 2021

New Feature: Bulk Assign Leave Policies

Happy new year! We hope that 2021 brings you new opportunities, improved performance and overall success in all your endeavours. As always, we’ll support you with an efficient and effective payroll system. We’re kicking off the new year with a brand new feature – you can now assign leave policies to employees in bulk.

SimplePay’s leave functionality allows you to set a company default leave policy for all employees that are added to the system. You can then assign a different leave policy to employees if they are not on the default policy. Being able to assign leave policies now in bulk saves you time if you have many employees who are not on the company default policy. It is also useful for companies who do not have a single company default policy, but rather separate policies per pay point or pay frequency.

Once you have created your leave policies, you can assign them in bulk as follows:

Go to Employees > Bulk Actions
Click on Entitlement Policies under the Leave heading
Use the filters to select only those employees that are part of a specific pay point or pay frequency
Use the drop-down menus to allocate the leave policies for each leave type for each employee on the page. If all employees on the page are on the same policy, use the Copy first value down option to save you time.
Click Save

It’s as simple as that. For more information on leave management and bulk leave actions, refer to the following pages:

Team SimplePay

December 17, 2020

Week 53 Guidance for Non-Monthly Salaried Employees

Week 53 payments apply to employees that you pay on a weekly, fortnightly or four-weekly basis and whose final pay date of the year falls on 30 or 31 December. They arise every five or six years, due to the fact that a standard year has 52 weeks and one (1) day.

This year has a week 53 scenario, so to ensure that your employees get tax credits and deductions and so reduce the amount of tax they pay, we’ve made this blog post to guide you on the steps to follow.

Weekly / Fortnightly Employees Whose Pay Dates Don’t Fall on Friday, 1 January 2021.

By week 52 of the tax year, an employee taxed on the cumulative basis has exhausted his or her annual allowances, tax credits and rate bands. This means that if week 53 continued to be taxed in the same way, your employees would experience a drop in their take home pay.

To get around this, the submission for Week 53 needs to be done on a week 1 basis for your non-monthly paid employees.

To do this, all you need to do on SimplePay is:

Ensure you have the correct / latest RPN or the relevant employees; and
complete your submission to Revenue for the relevant period.

Your employees will receive additional amounts of tax credits and rate bands, proportional to their pay frequency to accommodate the extra submission (e.g. an increase of 1/52 the value of the credits and deductions is provided for weekly paid employees).

Weekly / Fortnightly Employees’ Whose Pay Date Falls on Friday, 1 January 2021.

You are normally required to report your employees’ pay to Revenue on or before their pay date. However, if you pay your non-monthly paid employees on a Friday, the week 53 pay date falls on Friday, 1 January 2021, which is a bank holiday.

Where an employee’s pay date falls on a bank holiday you’re allowed to pay your employees on the previous working day (i.e. Thursday 31 December 2020). If this applies to some of your employees, you must do the following:

Ensure you have the correct / latest RPN or the relevant employees;
Record the pay date as 1 January 2021 and NOT 31 December 2020
Complete your submission to Revenue for the relevant period.

SimplePay will use the RPN to calculate the amounts due, based on the 2021 credit rates and rate bands. Because this allows the use of 2021 rates, the payment falls in the 2021 tax year and so it is not a week 53 payment.

Reminder for 2021 Payroll Submissions

At the start of each year the RPNs from the previous year will expire, meaning that for us to calculate your employees’ tax liability, we need you to create / request a new RPN for the new year. The default until this has been completed is to process tax on the emergency basis, so we would strongly recommend you do this before making any payments or submissions for 2021.

As we like to make your life easy, SimplePay allows you to do this as one single bulk action. All you need to do is sign into your SimplePay profile and go to:

Employees > Bulk Actions > Update RPNs.
Use the checkboxes next to the employees’ names to select which employees you wish to request an RPN for.
Click Create / Update at the top of the screen.

That’s it, you’re then ready to complete your first pay run of 2021. Easy! More information on this can be found on our help site page, linked here.

We hope that you have found the above information useful. If you have any questions on how the information above relates to SimplePay, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].

Keep well and stay safe.

Team SimplePay