SnowdropKCS end of life and migrating to another Sage product

Summary

This article is guidance on the End of Life of SnowdropKCS and migrating to other Sage products.

Description

In April 2020, Sage announced the end of support for SnowdropKCS Payroll and HR. All support will cease on 06/04/2022.

There will be no helpdesk support and no further updates or development of the software after this date.

Customers using systems hosted by Sage will no longer have access to the software, and will therefore need to extract any data they wish to keep before this date.

Customers with on-premise copies of the software have the option of purchasing a read-only licence, which will allow ongoing single-user access to their system for the purpose of viewing data and running historic reports, but not processing. If on-premise customers do not purchase a read-only licence, their access to the software will end when their support contract expires.

If you are querying how to get a copy of your database see article How do I get a copy of my SnowdropKCS database?

Resolution

Timeline for final updates for Payroll

Republic of Ireland, Jersey and Guernsey

There was a legislative update released in December 2021 which provided 2022 constants and legislative changes for the Republic of Ireland, Jersey and Guernsey. This was the last legislative update for these countries. An end of year guide was produced to accompany this, as with previous years. Any legislative changes for these countries that comes in to effect after the 5th April 2022 will not be developed for SnowdropKCS. The final day of Helpdesk support is 5th April 2022, there will be no support from Sage after this date.

UK and Isle of Man

There was an update to P60 layouts for the 2021-2022 tax year to allow UK payrolls to be run up to the end of 2021-2022. Isle of Man T14 forms and submissions are possible for 2021-2022. End of year guides were produced for these countries. These updates were released in March 2022. There will NOT be any legislative update for the 2022-2023 tax year, so you should not process the 2022-2023 tax year in SnowdropKCS. Please note that due to the Helpdesk closing on the 5th April 2022, if you are running end of year routines after this date, there will be no support. Likewise, if you need to do Additional FPS/EYU corrections after the 5th April 2022, there will be no support for this from Sage.

UK P11D

The final SnowdropKCS P11D update was for the 2020-2021 tax year, released in April 2021. There will not be a P11D update for the 2021-2022 tax year, as this would normally be due after the end of life date. Customers that are payrolling benefits can do so up to the final period of the 2021-2022 tax year.

Keeping records

HMRC guidance is that employers should keep payroll records for a minimum of three years prior to the start of the current tax year. This guidance, along with details of what you are expected to retain, can be viewed on the HMRC website at: https://www.gov.uk/paye-for-employers/keeping-records

The Pensions Regulator's guidance is that employers should keep records relating to pension automatic enrolment for a minimum of six years. This guidance can be viewed on the Pensions Regulators website at: Ongoing duties for employers | The Pensions Regulator

We recommend you extract and save reports so that you are able to provide this data, if requested. You can create your own reports using the report generator if you wish. Below are suggestions of standard reports you may want to retain copies of, clicking the heading will open our guide on how to produce that report. We recommend saving the reports by tax year so that you can dispose of them when no longer required.

Costing Report - this can be run historically, and the file produced can be opened with Microsoft Excel.

P60 Reports - these are produced as PDF files with the P60 PDF Production feature, and can be generated for previous tax years as far back as the 2011-2012 tax year.

Payslips - these can be saved in PDF format for reference, but will not line up when printed on stationery.

P11 Working Document reports - these can be generated for the current and previous years. We recommend exporting and saving as PDF.

Customers that have the P11D Module may also want to keep copies of:

P11D Special Stationery - this can be produced for previous tax years and saved as a PDF.

P11D(b) Special Stationery - this can be produced for previous tax years and saved as a PDF.

Alternative products - UK payrolls

For larger payrolls, we offer Sage 50 Cloud Payroll, which is available with different employee breaks and numbers of companies depending on what is required. Customers with very large payrolls in SnowdropKCS may need to split these across several companies in Sage 50 Cloud Payroll. Sage 50 Cloud Payroll links to our Instant, Sage 50 and Sage 200 accounts products. For information on extracting data from SnowdropKCS Payroll to migrate to Sage 50 Cloud Payroll (or another UK payroll product), Read more >

Small payrolls (up to 50 employees) may be able to use Sage Business Cloud Payroll.

Republic of Ireland payrolls

We offer Sage 50 Payroll (IE) for customers needing to process Irish payrolls. If migrating ROI payrolls to Sage Payroll, you will need to create reports to export employee details and (unless starting to use Sage Payroll at the beginning of the tax year) to-date values. For our internal guidance on this, Read more >

Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey payrolls

We currently do not offer any alternative product for payrolls in these countries.

P11D (UK)

For UK P11D processing, we offer Sage 50 P11D. This links to Sage 50 Cloud Payroll for the purpose of importing employees and certain types of benefit.

HR

As an alternative to SnowdropKCS HR we offer Sage HR.