What Payroll Software ?

[Chris_w666]

I am trying to complete our employer annual returns online and am finding it a royal PITA as we used the HMRC CD ROM to do our calcualtions but have 24 employees so cannot send the returns directly. Instead I am going to be spending all day entering people into an online system and then entering lovely P14 details .

I know in PH land lots of you will be in the same boat and am wondering if anyone can recommend payroll software that either smooths this process or does the whole package and is a combination of reliable and cost effective.

[Crusoe]

SAP

[Tuscanless Ali]

http://www.12pay.co.uk/

So cheap for what it does, not even £50 a year!

[Six Fiend]

I use Sage Instant Payroll which uploads files to Sage Accounts and also submits the PYE forms to HMRC for me.

Been using it for many years and get on well with it

[Galileo1]

We use moneysoft for payroll and accounts, pretty straightforward (has to be coz i need to use it!) and has a variety of different software packages and you even get a months free "sample"!

[RJD223]

Sage Payroll does this trick for us - we have 9 employees.

Year end was done on Friday in about an hour - all submitted to HMRC!

Piece of cake

[benoli]

Sage Payroll for us
and we've got 65 employees

[Chris_w666]

Those of you that use SAGE.

Is it vital that you attend their training courses or is the program self explanitory?

[smartie]

The trouble with Sage is the expense, you pretty much are forced to pay for payroll sage cover at £400+ per year or you dont get the annual updates.

In comparison, moneysoft is either £50 or £100 per year (depending on no of employees) and includes ALL updates.

No brainer IMO

[Tuscanless Ali]

Chris_w666 said:

Those of you that use SAGE.

Is it vital that you attend their training courses or is the program self explanitory?

If you have a basic idea of what you should be doing it's pretty self explanatory, but of all the payroll programs I have used I find Sage the most user unfriendly, (The dos version was great, but I just don't like the windows version.)

Iris is a great package, may be worth a look.

[KevF]

I use SAGE and have 130 hourly paid staff and 9 salaried and have no isseus with it at all....sometimes the SAGE helpline takes too long to get any issues sorted but they do eventually get sorted.....

[RJD223]

Chris_w666 said:

Those of you that use SAGE.

Is it vital that you attend their training courses or is the program self explanitory?

Nah - it's pretty self explanatory and the new versions have video help built in too.

For year end you'll need the SageCover supports (costs us £250/year for it). They send you a booklet and software updates for the new tax year.

Biggest upside for me is that the nominal links are posted directly into Sage Line 50 (which we use for our accounts) so it takes a load of hassle away from updating things.

Submissions are done on-line too which is good and if you have on-link banking module (we haven't for Payroll but have for Line 50) it'll create a Payroll file so you can just upload it and that's your payments done.

Pretty sure you'd be able to get a demo version of it from somewhere.

We buy our Sage gear through a reseller: http://www.spjsol.co.uk/

Hope that helps!

[Chris_w666]

Have looked at the suggestions made here, thanks everyone.

Have worked out we qualify for a discounted price for Sage and with the ability to link it with our banks payments system it seems to be the best solution for us.