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National Minimum Wage and PRSI AX Changes

The national minimum wage in Ireland will increase from €9.80 to €10.10 per hour from 1 February 2020 for people aged 20 years and older. This will have an impact on both PRSI and USC.

PRSI will be impacted as follows:

  1. There will be no changes to the employee rates for PRSI.
  2. There will be no change to the employee PRSI credit.
  3. The PRSI employer threshold for class AX will change from €386 to €395 (weekly).

The PRSI contribution rates will therefore be as follows for private and some public sector employments:

As always, SimplePay takes the hassle out of compliance for our users. We have already made updates to the system to ensure that the PRSI calculation is correct, depending on the date of your payslip. This means that if you prepare payslips that are dated before 1 February 2020, the system will use the previous thresholds, while payslips dated from 1 February 2020 will use the updated thresholds. There is therefore no need for you to make any changes or updates on your end – you simply continue capturing payroll as usual.

The USC threshold for the 2% bracket will also change so that full-time minimum wage workers stay in the same USC bracket. This change will be reflected through changes in employee RPNs. Revenue is still in discussion about an effective date and we will keep you updated.

For more information on PRSI and USC, check out our help pages here.

Team SimplePay

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Bulk Import Employees from ROS

We have a new feature that we’re very excited about and think you will be too. It’s now possible to import new / additional employees and their RPNs directly from ROS. This means that you no longer need to manually add employees if they exist on ROS with a valid RPN. 

To import employees in bulk, navigate to Employees > Bulk Actions > Import Additional Employees. After importing the list of employees from ROS, simply select the employees you want to save, complete some basic employee information and select the save button. The selected employees will be created in SimplePay. 

For more information, please refer to our help site page or contact our Support team who will be more than happy to help you.

We hope you will enjoy this new feature us much as we will.

Team SimplePay

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Year in Review

As 2019 (and the decade) draws to a close, we’d like to thank you for choosing SimplePay as your payroll software provider. We really value the loyalty, ideas, feedback and love that we get from you, our clients.

We would also like to take this opportunity to reflect on the year that has been. 2019 was certainly a year of growth for our team. We changed our branding to better represent ourselves as a global entity and were honoured to be nominated as a Xero App Partner of the Year for South Africa. Some of the major features and functions that we accomplished were:

  • Custom items based on system items, and the subsequent expansion of this feature
  • Live chat support
  • Custom employee fields in Basic Info
  • A new leave days report
  • Customisation of employee self-service
  • PRSI classes expansion
  • Dual employment
  • Bulk actions for once-off payslips and overriding payslip end dates
  • Leave expiration
  • A gender field as preparation for gender pay gap reporting
  • QuickBooks integration upgrade
  • Automatic logout for idle accounts

In 2020, you can expect the team to continue striving to enhance your payroll experience. As always, all added features are completely free for all and do not change the monthly fee that you pay.

From all of us here at SimplePay, have a joyful festive season. We are looking forward to a great 2020 together!

Team SimplePay

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Automatic Logout Feature

We are happy to announce a new security feature as part of our ongoing commitment to protecting your data and helping you stay safe online. We already have the highest of security standards in place, and last year we introduced an optional 2-factor authentication feature to prevent access to your account if someone has your password. Now, our optional timeout feature allows you to choose how long the system can be left idle for before automatically logging you out of SimplePay.

With this new feature, if you forget to log out of SimplePay, the next person that uses that computer or electronic device will not have access to your account. This is especially beneficial to you if you share computers in the workplace, if you work on public computers or if you are concerned that someone will use your electronic device when you leave it unattended.

To access this feature:

  • Go to the Profile icon and select User Profile
  • Click on Lock screen after timeout
  • Select a timeout option.
    • If you select ‘Disabled’, you will not be logged out of the system, no matter how long a page has been left idle for.
    • If you select a time from the menu (e.g. ‘1 hour’), it means that the system will log you out if there has been inactivity for the time specified.
  • Click Save

Just another way that SimplePay is helping you take care of your sensitive employee data.

Team SimplePay

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QuickBooks Integration Upgrade

As the year draws to a close, our holiday elves have been bustling behind the scenes to enhance your payroll experience, focusing on our QuickBooks integration. SimplePay integrates with both QuickBooks and Xero, allowing you to send your payroll information straight from SimplePay into your general ledger accounts with the click of a button. This means that you do not have to switch between systems to transfer information, saving you time and reducing the possibility of human error.

You’ll be happy to hear that our QuickBooks integration has been refined to give you an upgraded user interface and setup. These improvements will make the process easier to navigate and simpler to understand if you wish to integrate your payroll and accounting information.

If you have already integrated QuickBooks and SimplePay in the past, please note that you may be required to re-authenticate your account due to the work done behind the scenes.

For more information on integrating SimplePay with QuickBooks, head on over to our help page.

Team SimplePay 

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Gender Pay Gap Reporting

The Gender Pay Gap Information Bill 2019 (Bill 30 of 2019) is currently going through the legislative process and it is important for Irish employers to begin preparations at an early stage. Gender pay gap reporting is likely to become mandatory for employers who have an employee volume above a certain number. 

To assist with this potential reporting obligation, SimplePay has added a Gender field to the Basic Info screen for employees. You can indicate the gender of each employee individually or in bulk as follows:

Individually:

  • Go to Employees
  • Select an employee 
  • Go to Edit Info > Basic Info
  • Select ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ from the Gender dropdown list
  • Click Save

In bulk:

  • Go to Employees > Bulk Actions > Essentials
  • Select ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ from the Gender dropdown list next to each employee
  • Click Save

You will now also be able to indicate the gender of each employee when you add employees individually or in bulk. This is covered in more detail on our help site here.

Reporting will include mean and median pay gaps in hourly pay and bonuses, gender discrepancies for employees that receive bonuses and benefits in kind, and action plans to resolve these differences.

You can obtain the numerical data from the Transaction History Report by going to Reports > Transaction History Report. You can then use Excel’s sort functionality and mean and median formulas to calculate the needed information. More information about reports from SimplePay can be found here.

If you require any assistance, please contact our support team.

Team SimplePay

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We’re App Partner of the Year Finalists

SimplePay is delighted and proud to announce that we have been chosen as a finalist for the App Partner of the Year: South Africa for the Xero Awards taking place in March 2020. Xero is the leading cloud-based accounting software in the market and we are honoured to be recognised for our integration and synergy.

As SimplePay uses the same approach to Xero integration in all our regions, you can be assured that you are receiving the same quality features no matter what region you are in. We aspire to be finalists in all regions when these awards are announced in the future. 

A huge thank you to our wonderful team. Your dedication and commitment to making SimplePay the best cloud-based payroll system for our customers has made this possible. And of course, an even bigger thank you to our customers. Without your support, loyalty and feedback, we wouldn’t be what we are. We look forward to continuing to serve your payroll needs.

To find out more about SimplePay’s integration with Xero, head over to our help page here.

Team SimplePay

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New Feature: Employee Leave Expiration

Introducing the latest system expansion from the SimplePay team: employee leave expiration for leave days carried over.

With our aim to give you the ultimate payroll experience, you can now customise your leave settings even further by specifying how long leave carried over from a previous
leave cycle remains valid for. For example, you might have a policy that any unused leave from 2019 may carry over to 2020, but if it is not used by the end of June 2020, it will expire and be forfeited.

This is usually done to ensure that your employees’ leave does not excessively accumulate. In addition, by prompting employees to take their leave in due course, it leads to increased employee well-being which has long-term benefits for both employees and the company. Before implementing this on the system, ensure that it aligns with your company’s leave policy and your employees’ contracts to avoid any labour disputes.

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To make use of this new feature on current policies, follow these easy steps:

  1. Go to Settings > Leave.
  2. Click on View next to the leave type that you wish to edit.
  3. Under Available Entitlement Policies, click on View next to the entitlement policy that you wish to edit.
  4. If the Allow leave to be carried forward to next cycle? checkbox is set, there will now be an additional line that appears under it.
  5. In the new field , enter the number of months that leave must be held for before expiring.
  6. Click Save.

If you are creating a new leave policy, you will be able to follow the same process when creating the entitlement policy.

For more information on creating and editing leave entitlement policies, head over to our help page here.

Team SimplePay

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New Self-Service Features

We have been working on expanding our self-service functionality recently and are pleased to announce that we have added two new features. These changes allow you to disable different types of self-service requests (i.e. leave and / or info update requests). You’re now also able to hide leave balances for all or some of your leave types.

You can make these setup changes by navigating to Employees > Self-Service > Settings and then selecting either General or Leave from the drop-down menu.

To disable self-service request types, select General from the menu and select whichever types of requests you would like to disable for self-service. Once you’ve done this, self-service users won’t be able to submit any new requests for the type you disabled.

To hide leave balances, select Leave from the menu and uncheck the leave types for which you would like to hide the balances. After you’ve done this, self-service users won’t be able to see their leave balances for the specific leave type, but will still be able to submit requests.

We hope that these new features improve your payroll processing experience. 

For more information on how to make these changes, please refer to our help site pages here or contact our support team.

Team SimplePay

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Introducing Dual Employment

We love giving you a great payroll experience and, once again, the SimplePay team has been hard at work to respond to your payroll needs. We are delighted to introduce you to dual employment on our system.

Dual employment occurs when:

  • you have an employee on your payroll with two active employments AND
  • you want to keep the two sets of pay separate on your payroll records.

In practice, this usually means that the employee is assigned two different employee numbers and/or IDs.

SimplePay has provided better support for dual employment as follows:

  • To enable dual employment, there is a check box under Other Statutory Info on an employee’s Basic Info screen that says Allow Multiple Employment. Tick this checkbox to allow you to capture two employees with the same PPSN.
  • When adding two employees with the same PPSN without setting the checkbox, you will encounter a validation error. This is to ensure that you do not accidentally capture an employee twice on the system when it is not dual employment, but simply a duplicate.
  • Allowing dual employment on the system will assign different Employment Identifiers to the employee, ensuring that submissions to Revenue are reported correctly. You can read more about Employment Identifiers here.

This extended functionality of the system is also outlined on our help page here.

If you have any queries, do not hesitate to reach out to our Support team.

Team SimplePay