Over payroll year end, you may have an employee whose leave date and last pay date are in different tax years. For example, the employee leaves in tax month 12 of the 2023/2024 tax year and receives their final pay in tax month 1 of 2024/2025.

You can process a leaver in this scenario before or after completing payroll year end. However, you must still complete your year end and send the year end submission by the deadline of 19 April 2024.

HMRC require that the P45 shows the date that the employee left, with the Year To Date values for the tax year that their leave date falls in. 

You need to process the employee's final pay period in 2024/2025 as normal then set the process date into 2023/2024 tax year to process the employee as a leaver and print the P45. You can then set the process date back into 2024/2025 to submit the full payment submission (FPS).

TIP: If a leaver doesn't appear on the Employee List at any point, check the Criteria option in case current year or historical leavers are excluded.  

Process the leaver

After you process the employee's final payments as normal and update records, continue to the steps below.

1. Process and update records for the employee's final pay period, but don't send the FPS yet.
   TIP: If the employee hasn't been paid and won't be paid in the tax year their leave date falls in, update a period with 0 pay.
2. Click Payroll, then Change Process Date.
3. Set the process date to a date in the previous tax year.
4. On the employee list, click the required employee.
5. Follow the steps to process a leaver and produce their P45, entering the date the employee last worked for you.
6. In the stationery drop-down list, click the relevant P45 stationery then click Print then click OK.
7. Click Finish. The following message appears:
   'Employment end date falls before a later period which has already been updated. Do you want to continue?
8. Click Yes then click Save.
9. Click Close.

You can now set the process date to the date that you paid the employee in the 2024/2025 tax year and submit the FPS as normal.

As well as the leave date, the FPS submits the values from 2024/2025 to HMRC. When HMRC receive the first FPS from any new employer, they'll contact the new employer to advise what they need to do, for example, change the employee's tax code.

NOTE: If you spot that the P45 displays month number 1 but includes figures from the previous tax year, don’t worry. This occurs because the employee received payment in the new tax year but left during the previous tax year.