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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

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We Have Expanded Our PRSI Classes

Simplicity forms the foundation of our company ethos. It’s in our name, in the way we conduct business and in the way we build our system. However, we realise that sometimes you have specific needs that require us to make some tweaks or expansions. With this in mind, we are happy to announce that we now support PRSI sub-classes A8 and A9 for employees employed under a Community Employment Scheme.

When adding a new employee, you will now see “A (Normal)” and “A (Community Employment)” as drop-down options for PRSI Class. There is no difference between the two PRSI sub-classes for employee PRSI contributions. However, selecting “A (Community Employment)” will impact the employer PRSI contribution. The contribution rates for PRSI can be seen here.

For more information on PRSI, head over to our help page.

As always, if you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team.

Team SimplePay

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Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference

Sometimes small changes make a big difference, so you may spot some modifications that we have made to leave.

  • A new report

We have added a new report called Leave Days Report. This report shows the specific days that employees have taken/will take leave for the specified leave type and period. It complements our current Leave Report, which shows you the total number of leave days taken during the period, made up of the individual days shown on the Leave Days Report. This added leave report will simplify your payroll duties, as you can confirm leave dates with employees or managers. It is also useful in the management of employees and communication with other departments.

  • Visual tweaks to entitlement policies

We have made it clearer to see whether or not an employee is on the default company leave policy. When going to an employee’s profile and clicking on Leave > Entitlement Policies > Edit, (company default) will now display next to the leave policy if the employee is on the company’s default policy. In addition, we have updated the heading to display as Active Entitlement Policies.

You can still see the company default policy by going to Settings > Leave > View (next to the leave type) and scrolling to the bottom. However, we have changed the heading to Active Entitlement Policies (company defaults) to align with the changes made in the employees’ profiles.

We hope that these small changes will make a big difference in your payroll experience. If you need any help with leave management, refer to our help page here. For more information on reports, click here.

Team SimplePay

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Extension of Pay & File Deadline for ROS Customers for 2019

On 9 May 2019, Revenue announced an extension to the ROS return filing and tax payment date for certain customers.

The new deadline of 12 November 2019 applies to:

  1. Customers who file the 2018 Form 11 return and make the appropriate payment through ROS for Preliminary Tax for 2019 and Income Tax balance due for 2018
  2. Beneficiaries who received gifts or inheritances with valuation dates in the year ended 31 August 2019 and who make a CAT return and the appropriate payment through ROS.
  3. PAYE customers who are required by Revenue to file a Form 12 for 2018 and who opt to use the online version.

To qualify for the extension in 1 and 2 above, both the return and payment must be done through ROS, otherwise the original 31 October 2019 deadline applies.

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Bulk Actions for Once-off Payslips

We are happy to announce that we have increased our bulk actions functionality to include bulk actions for once-off payslips. If you have multiple employees with once-off payslips and need to add items to these payslips, you can now do so in bulk by going to Employees > Bulk Actions.

From here, you can select either Payslip Inputs or Clocking Imports. Then click on Switch to once-off payslips and capture your data accordingly. Please take note of the following:

  • Payslip Inputs: As always, only once-off items (i.e. no regular items) can be added to once-off payslips.
  • Clocking Imports:  Only custom items with Payslip Inputs are supported for this method.

To read more about these functions, the following help pages are available:

Bulk Actions

Clocking Imports

If you need further assistance with this new functionality, please contact our support team.

Team SimplePay