Moving from cloud based Sage Payroll to Sage 50 Payroll

How to move your company and employee information from Sage Payroll to Sage 50 Payroll.

Sage Business Cloud Payroll

You can export the following information from Sage Business Cloud Payroll in a PDF format.

• Payslips
• The detailed payroll report
• P11 Reports
• P45s
• P32 Employer Payment Record
• P60s
• Pension contributions

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Sage 50 Payroll

Create a new company

Your first step in Sage 50 Payroll is to create your new company. Set up or connect to another company

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Enter your e-submission settings

To submit directly to HMRC from Sage 50 Payroll, you need to enter your e-Submission settings

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Set up departments and cost centres

To help organise your employees, you can set up company departments and cost centres. Create and manage your departments and cost centres

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Set up your payments and deductions

Before you can pay your employees or take any deductions, you need to set up your payments and deductions.

• Set up and assign payments
• Set up and assign deductions

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Set up your pension schemes

If you have one or more company pension schemes, you must enter these into Sage 50 Payroll. Set up a pension scheme >

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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.

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Enter your employee information

Before your set up your employees, you should consider the following:

• RTI Payroll ID - Sage Business Cloud Payroll can assign employees with RTI Payroll IDs which contain special characters. We recommended that you allow Sage 50 Payroll to automatically create/assign an RTI ID to the employees with a the Previous RTI ID status set as ‘Unknown’.  There are two reasons for this:
  • It lets HMRC know that the employee doesn't have a new job and helps them to match the employee to their existing employment record
  • Special characters in the RTI Payroll ID may cause a conflict with Pensions Data Exchange
• Automatic Enrolment - If you use the Sage 50 Payroll Pension Module, you must manually assign a pension scheme to your employees.  You can then set the auto enrolment status of each employee when you set up the Pensions Module

Once you enter your company information, you can enter your employee details and if required, their year to date (YTD) values. 

Sage Business Cloud doesn't allow you to export your employee information into a csv/excel file you will have to set the records up manually.

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Enter your employees

You can use the Quick Employee option to enter the details for each of your employees in one window.

Alternatively, if you have a spreadsheet with your employee details you can use the employee details data import in Sage 50 Payroll.

Sage 50 Payroll includes import templates to help you prepare the import file in the correct format.

NOTE: You must ensure all employee details in the import spreadsheet are completed correctly before you import data.

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Enter your employees' Year To Date values

Entering the YTDs is a valid route that you can take when setting up employees, however this means that the employment allowance and/or apprenticeship levy, if applicable, will have to be accounted for manually for the remainder of the tax year.

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.

You can use the table method or exact percentage method to calculate NI. 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'll be slightly different. This is fine and accepted by HMRC. You can continue to process NI in Sage 50 Payroll using the table method.

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Check your data

Once 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 into Sage 50 Payroll, you can use the Health Check option. It tells you if there are any issues which may cause your HMRC submissions to fail. 

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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 an employer payment summary (EPS) to let HMRC know.

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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.

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Statutory maternity, paternity and adoption pay

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

• Statutory maternity pay
• Statutory paternity pay
• Statutory adoption pay

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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).

If the employee's AWE is high enough to pay SSP, you can enter this information in their record.

1. Double-click the required employee.
2. Click the Absence tab then click SSP.
3. Enter the AWE figure in the box to the right of the Auto Calc button.
4. Click OK then click Save then click Close.

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.

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Online services

If you used Sage HR Online Services in Sage Payroll, you can set it up in Sage 50 Payroll. It's not possible to transfer your online portal over to Sage 50 Payroll, so you need to:

1. Contact Sage technical support to request the deletion of your online portal linked to Sage Payroll.
2. Once the deletion is complete, set up Online Services in Sage 50 Payroll.

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