Get your Christmas Payroll ready!

We’re all getting ready for the Christmas break, but there are a number of things that you might need to get ready this week so that you get your payroll organised so that contractors get paid on time! You don’t want to get any calls over the festive break! 

Get your BACS payments ready
This year, Christmas falls on a Friday with a bank holiday on the Monday 28th December for Boxing Day. Contract workers who are usually paid on a Friday will need to be paid a day earlier on Thursday 24th December, which means that you need to have your BACS set up on Tuesday 22nd December.

It takes three days for a BACS payment to hit the account, (including the sent date and the funds credit as being the third day), so you need to take into account the fact funds can’t credit Friday 25th or Monday 28th due to being Christmas bank holidays.

The same will apply the following week as the bank holiday for New Year’s Day will impact your contract workers who will be used to being paid on a Friday, as the New Year Bank holiday falls on Friday 1st January. You’ll need to set up BACS payments on Tuesday 29th December so that funds clear in their account on Thursday 31st December.

Keep your contractual payment dates the same

If you are paying any workers via PAYE, you will need to make sure that you use the usual pay day, even if they receive the funds earlier (ie: before Christmas rather than right at the end of the month).

This is important because it can impact any contract workers’ Universal Credit. If you report the contractors’ pay day as the date that they received their payment, it could impact their current or future entitlement.

Check to see if you have Faster Payments

If you use Faster Payments instead of BACS to pay your contract workers over the festive period, then they may find that their wages don’t clear when they are meant to.
If the BACS payment is usually set up for a Friday, it will typically clear into their account at around midnight on the Friday, so when they wake up and check their account, they will see the funds clear.

If you choose to use Faster Payments to pay your contract workers, it’s likely that you’ll do it on the Friday morning when you get in to work and it may not clear in their account until after lunch-time, or potentially the end of the day.

How can Evertime help you to manage early payments?

There are some great built in features in Evertime that can help you to get prepared for the festive-close down.

1. Email Designs
Our easy-to-use and customisable email designs allow you to change the wording to inform contract workers of their revised payment dates.  You might choose to do this regularly – for our managed service clients, we start doing this from November.

2. Online Timesheets
We strongly advise everyone to make use of the Evertime Online Timesheet system that’s built into the software. Not only is it better for the contractor, you will have complete visibility of the status of your contract workers’ timesheets so that you know who to chase up for submission and to make sure that they are approved. This means you’ll know when everyone is ready and you can set the payroll up.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish all of our clients a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

**We are closed for Christmas on Friday 25th December, Monday 28th December and Friday 1st January.**