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How do payroll companies instruct banks to make salary payments?

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    #11
    Originally posted by 7specialgems View Post

    This got me thinking - how do companies with loads of employees do it?
    Quite tedious pre agreed arrangements for submitting BACS on behalf of others - normally requiring weekly pre agreed passwords. Its possible, but really for large payrolls not one man companies.

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      #12
      Isn't this the kind of noddy stuff you could pay your spouse to do?
      Originally posted by Stevie Wonder Boy
      I can't see any way to do it can you please advise?

      I want my account deleted and all of my information removed, I want to invoke my right to be forgotten.

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        #13
        My accountant runs the payroll and tells me what tax is owed when. Creating one SO and four Bill Payments a year isn't too onerous.

        I don't get expenses, all company expenses are paid for by MyCo directly. So no complications there either. Call it an hour a month.

        But NLUK is right; it's your company and you are its director. If running it is too difficult/boring/time-consuming then tough. Your job is being a contractor; get on and do it. If you really don't want to do it, go use an umbrella.
        Blog? What blog...?

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          #14
          ...

          Originally posted by 7specialgems View Post
          Slow down Northernlad, there's no need to introduce the hysterical 'I'm a real contractor, you're a bum on a seat' straw man.

          My intention in starting the thread was to find out how anyone else who outsources payroll does so, and if this includes outsourcing the actual payments, how.

          Clearly you enjoy the hands-on approach to all of the different psuedo-departments of YouCo. Good luck to you if you do, I don't see that as right or wrong and it worked fantastically well for people like Alan Sugar but I favour a divide and conquer approach and to package up and delegate what I see as overhead and concentrate on the billing side and trying to make the company larger.

          Whether or not that is a purist thing to do is arguably irrelevant, but my response to 'you want your cake and eat it' is 'too right' - of course I want to pay someone to do the boring parts whilst do the bits I enjoy.

          Thanks for the poster who mentioned MSC. I had completely oversighted on this.
          It is not only what NL suggets, these forums are littered with people who didn't want to be bothered then came back crying after 5 years of poor services that they were too lazy to check. I would guess in most cases, it was too late to do anything to mitigate the exorbitant cost of experience.

          Along with divesting yourself of the effort, you inevitably increase the risk.

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            #15
            You'd have to speak with your bank and ask them if they offer an 'Autopay' type setup, this is what many payroll agents use but it is being phased out by most high street banks now.

            It works by the client authorising the payroll agent to send a payment instruction to the bank on a set payment pattern every month/week and the bank processing this and making the necessary payments to the accounts listed which can include salary, expenses, PAYE etc.

            For the payment of one salary and one expense submission a month the costs in my opinion wouldn't be worth it but the bank would probably only charge ~£20 per month for this which seems like it might be a price you'd be willing to pay. You'd obviously have to find a bank that would provide this and a service provider that would do your payroll/expenses as you wish and see how much one would charge for this service.

            If it's your accountant you would need to be careful with the MSC legislation as others have mentioned.

            Hope this gives you a starting point for your search.

            Martin
            Contratax Ltd

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              #16
              There has been some useful information on this thread. Thanks all for that. Certainly it appears that outsourcing the actual instruction and payment of funds is uneconomical for a YouCo and a huge no-no from an MSC perspective.

              Instead of pursuing that further, it would appear that the best course is to route all expenses through a company credit card to mitigate the need to pay employee expenses (thank you Malvolio) and to migrate my sordid dance of spreadsheets to a capable cloud platform to speed up the payroll (thank you NL - said sorry array only came into being due to the poor reporting capability of my former accountant's* cloud tool and my distrust of their calculations, and my persistence to maintain shadow books).

              * When you read accountant, read "shareholder of the company who is an accountant, but who is a complete ghost who employs about 80 beautiful young below-the-wage-of-20 female administrators who would appear to have no accounting qualifications whatsoever between them".
              Last edited by 7specialgems; 14 July 2015, 13:59.

              Comment


                #17
                Originally posted by 7specialgems View Post
                There has been some useful information on this thread. Thanks all for that. Certainly it appears that outsourcing the actual instruction and payment of funds is uneconomical for a YouCo and a huge no-no from an MSC perspective.

                Instead of pursuing that further, it would appear that the best course is to route all expenses through a company credit card to mitigate the need to pay employee expenses (thank you Malvolio) and to migrate my sordid dance of spreadsheets to a capable cloud platform to speed up the payroll (thank you NL - said sorry array only came into being due to the poor reporting capability of my former accountant's* cloud tool and my distrust of their calculations, and my persistence to maintain shadow books).

                * When you read accountant, read "shareholder of the company who is an accountant, but who is a complete ghost who employs about 80 beautiful young below-the-wage-of-20 female administrators who would appear to have no accounting qualifications whatsoever between them".
                If you are looking for a decent online/cloud based accounting package I'd definitely recommend Freeagent, it covers most things pretty well and also has a build in basic payroll functions. The majority of accountants these days should be able to work with it so you shouldn't be limited to a few if you wanted to switch to a new one.

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                  #18
                  I do my own payroll using Brightpay

                  I love paying myself it gives me an enormous sense of wellbeing

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                    #19
                    ISTM that there are 3 distinct questions in here; and letting someone else touch your company bank account is not part of the answer to any of them

                    1. How to account for and reimburse expenses. This IMHO is the real question for the OP, other QQ are incidental and would be better not mixed up with this one. To me it's simple: you do the work yourself, or you pay somebody else to do it. The work is minimal if you set it up properly. I mean really minimal, I am a lazy disorganised sod but I find it no trouble, especially since there is money at the end of it. Expenses reimbursemenent need not be part of payroll. Personally I just put all receipts in a folder; once a week (or month if lazy) enter them in a simple spreadsheet and transfer them to a "done" folder; once a month, transfer the sum from Co to me.

                    2. Running payroll: without the expenses it is trivial. I use Sage One so that I have complete control over it and I can do it from my phone anywhere in the world. Equally your accountant would do it for a very small sum, or a slightly bigger sum if you wanted to be able to vary it every month for some reason.
                    That leaves you with only the bank payments to make to yourself, and as pointed out, far from being a chore, that is an activity that brings a nice warm glow.

                    3. Accountant. If you are bending your operational procedures into something that you can't or won't handle, in order to fit with your accountant, you know what to do about that.

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