Moving from another software provider

Summary

How to set up Sage 50 Payroll when moving from other software.

Description

If you're transferring your data from another software provider, after you've installed Sage 50 Payroll and created your company , you can follow the steps below to set up your company and employee settings.

Resolution

Enter your e-submission settings

So that you can submit directly to HMRC from your Sage 50 Payroll, you must enter your e-submission settings. These are the details you used to register with the online Government Gateway.

Set up departments and cost centres

If required, to help organise your employees, you can set up company departments and cost centres. You can create these in the Analysis tab within the company settings. Simply enter the department or cost centre reference and give it a name. Once you've finished, click Save. You can then assign your employees to the relevant departments or cost centres when entering their information.

Set up your payments and deductions

In Sage 50 Payroll, to pay your employees money or take any deductions, you need to create the relevant payments and deductions.

Set up your pension schemes

If you have one or more company pension schemes, you need to set them up in Sage 50 Payroll.

Set up your holiday schemes

If you have one or more holiday schemes for your company, you can enter this information into Sage 50 Payroll. You can set up both specified holiday schemes or calculated holiday schemes.

Enter your employee information

Once you enter your company level information, you can start entering your employee details and if required, their year to date (YTD) values. If you only have a small number of employees, you may just want to enter their information manually using the Quick Employee wizard. However, if you have a large number of employees, you might find it easier to import their details into Sage 50 Payroll.

NOTE: Any employees who have already been made a leaver and submitted to Revenue don't need to be transferred across. This means they won't be included on any reports, so you should print off any reports that you need for them from your previous software. Leavers don't affect your payroll year end.

Enter your employees manually

Using the Quick Employee wizard, you can enter the relevant details for each of your employees in one window. All mandatory information is highlighted with an asterisk (*).

Important considerations:

RTI Payroll ID - Enter the employees' existing RTI ID from your old software provider. For further information on this, visit our how to handle RTI IDs when changing software provider guide
Pension - If you've already been operating an automatic enrolment scheme, you can assign any employees currently on the scheme to a pension scheme in payroll. When setting up the pensions module, you can then confirm the auto enrolment status for these employees

Once you've entered the details for an employee, to save the details and clear the form ready for the next employee, click Save & Clear. Or to retain some of the basic details for the next employee, click Save & Retain. Add an existing employee >

Import your details

If you have a lot of employees, or have exported employee information from your old software, you can quickly import them into Sage 50 Payroll.

Once you have all of your employee information in the import template, to import the data you can use the Advanced Data Import wizard.

In the wizard, from the list of templates, ensure you select Employee Details and then browse to your import template. Ensure you add the correct RTI ID to the template for each employee before you import data.

Enter your employees' YTD values

TIP: To enter YTD values for a director, you should follow the process in our enter director year to date values guide.

To ensure your employees tax and national insurance (NI) continues to calculate correctly, you must enter their YTD values. You can find these on your P11 deduction reports from your previous software.

NI can be calculated using either the table method or exact percentage method. Sage 50 Payroll uses the table method, so if you're comparing values to those calculated using the exact percentage method in your previous software, they will be slightly different. This is fine and accepted by HMRC. You can continue to process NI in Sage 50 Payroll using the table method.

To enter the YTD values for your employees manually, you must first select all employees.

You can then open Employee Year To Date Values, and enter the relevant values for the first employee. To move onto the next employee, click Save then Next. Repeat this process for each employee. Employee year to date values >

Check your data

Now that you've set up your company and employee information, there are a few extra things we recommend you do before you're ready to process your first pay period in Sage 50 Payroll.

To ensure you've entered all the relevant information, you can use the useful Health Check option. It tells you if there are any issues that may cause your HMRC submissions to fail. The health check option >

Set up employment allowance

If you're eligible for employment allowance, to reclaim it from HMRC, you must set it up in Sage 50 Payroll and submit a one-off employer payment summary (EPS) to let HMRC know. Employment allowance >

First confirm with HMRC that you're eligible for employment allowance.

Employment allowance and Apprenticeship levy

These are both impacted by mid-year setup and when entering YTD values. To ensure the values for them are correct, you should either:

Calculate the values manually, outside of the software, from the mid-year point
Or reprocess the payroll from start of the tax year and the software will calculate these values automatically

Continue any statutory payments

If any of your employees are receiving statutory payments when you change your payroll software, you must set up the statutory payments to continue in Sage 50 Payroll. In order to do this, you need to process the remainder of the statutory payment manually. However, you can set up any new statutory payments to process automatically in Sage 50 Payroll. Visit the statutory payments hub.

Statutory maternity, paternity and adoption pay

The following guides take you through how to process these statutory payments manually.

NOTE: If you submit an Employer Payment Summary to adjust your payment to HMRC due statutory parental payments, check the value is correct manually. Your software includes parental pay values you process, but this doesn't include values you processed with another software provider.

Statutory sick pay (SSP)

The SSP calculation is based on the gross pay an employee earns in the eight weeks prior to the period of sickness. When you move to Sage 50 Payroll, this eight weeks gross pay doesn't exist in the software. An employee is entitled to SSP from the day they start with the company, as long as they meet qualifying criteria, including their average weekly earnings (AWE) being over the NI lower earnings limit (LEL). Statutory sick pay (SSP) - Qualifying rules >

If the employee's AWE is high enough to pay SSP, you can enter this information in their record. To do this, open the relevant employee's record, click Absence then SSP. Enter the AWE figure in the box to the right of the Auto Calc button then click OK.

If you've processed SSP in the eight weeks prior to moving to Sage 50 Payroll, you must enter historical SSP for the software to calculate linked periods of sickness.

Benefits for your employees above and beyond their payslips

We want to help your business where we can. That's why we are offering Sage Employee Benefits free to Sage customers for the first three months.

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