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Quarterly payments
Employers who expect their average monthly PAYE payment to be less
than £1,500 may pay quarterly instead of monthly, i.e. on 19 or 22 of July,
October, January and April.
Statutory payments
As an employer, you may well be in charge of administering statutory payments
to your employee. These are the minimum amounts the law says must be paid if
your employee cannot work due to them being ill or off work as they have just
had a baby for example. Here we are thinking about things like Statutory Sick Pay
(SSP) or Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP). HMRC have calculators that you can use
to work out the appropriate amounts:
www.gov.uk/calculate-statutory-sick-pay and
www.gov.uk/maternity-paternity-calculator
Usually you can recover some of the amounts that you pay to your employee by
way of SMP and other parental payments, however you can not recover any SSP.
Typically you do this by reducing the amount that you need to pay over to HMRC at
a later date. So, if you were due £26 reimbursement from HMRC because of your
employee’s SMP, but owed HMRC £72 is respect of the latest quarter’s tax and
NIC, you would only need to send them £46 and your account would be balanced.
For more on SSP, SMP and other statutory payments that replace income,
see our factsheet ‘’Pay’ for tax and NIC’. You can download this factsheet
from our website at www.disabilitytaxguide.org.uk/about/resources
Payslips
By law, you must give your employee a written pay statement when you pay them,
called a payslip. In most circumstances if you are using payroll software, this will
produce a payslip for you. Alternatively blank payslips for you to complete can be
purchased in most stationers.
Important note
HMRC’s free Basic PAYE tools payroll software does not produce payslips,
therefore if you want to operate your payroll electronically and want to use
HMRC’s free software, we have designed a payslip tool to be used in conjunction
with it which will produce a payslip for your employee each payday. You can
find this on our website: www.disabilitytaxguide.org.uk
Alternatively other commercial providers of payroll software may have the
functionality to produce payslips – there are lots of options out there.
HMRC have an accreditation scheme which means that they test various
payroll packages and make sure they meets their minimum standards:
www.gov.uk/payroll-software
page 34 Taking on a personal assistant – a basic guide • Final thoughts