As your furloughed employees start returning to work after being on the Job Retention Scheme (JRS), you may be wondering what action you need to take in Sage 50 Payroll. To find out the information you need to know, check the four steps below.

1. Is the final Job Retention Scheme pay period complete?

When the employee's back to work, before you process the first pay period, you need to check that the last period on the JRS has been updated.

To check it has been updated, you can check the Last Updated and Last FPS Date column on the employee list.

Up to date? 

This means you're ready to process the employee's first period back to work.

Not up to date?

Make sure that you've completed the payroll process for the employee's final period on furlough before processing the first period when they're back to work.

Need to process a combination of Job Retention Scheme pay and normal pay?

You may have instances where the employee is being paid part-JRS and part-normal pay. This is fine, in these cases you can process the employee's pay using two pay elements. One for the JRS payment and one for the normal payment.

TIP: Need to set up an extra payment? Check our pay element guide >   

2. What payments were used to process the Job Retention Scheme?

If you've been using a separate pay element to process furlough payments, you need to make sure that you clear the values so they're not included in your next pay period.

Check what payments have been used

The easiest way to check what pay elements have been used to process under the JRS is checking what payments appear within Enter Payments:

1. Click Payroll then click Change Process Date.
2. Enter the required process date for your pay period.
3. Select the required employees.
4. Click Enter Payments then check what payments are in use.
   If there's a payment for the JRS, set the Hours and Rate to 0.00. You can then process the employee's pay using their normal pay element.

NOTE: If you're paying a combination of JRS pay and normal pay in this pay period, you need to enter the relevant amount for the JRS payment. You can then set it to 0.00 once the period is complete after updating records.

3. Process the employee's first period back to work

Once you've checked that the final JRS payment is updated and, unless your paying a combination of JRS pay and normal pay, you've ensured it's not picked up in the next pay period, you're ready to process the employee's first period back to work as normal.

New to processing payroll? Check our processing guide >

4. Don't forget to submit your final Job Retention Scheme claim

If you haven't done so already, you need to submit your final JRS claim to HMRC. Find out how >

To make sure you submit your claim on time, use the table below to check the claim deadlines: