BrightPay 2016/17 is Now Available. What's New?

BrightPay 2016/17 is now available (for new customers and existing customers). Here’s a quick overview of what’s new:

2016/17 Tax Year Updates

• 2016/17 rates, thresholds and calculations for PAYE, National Insurance contributions, Student Loan deductions, Statutory Sick Pay, Statutory Maternity Pay, Statutory Adoption Pay, Statutory Paternity Pay, and Statutory Shared Parental Pay.
• The emergency tax code has changed from 1060L to 1100L. When importing from BrightPay 2015/16, L codes are uplifted by 40, while M codes are uplifted by 44 and N codes by 36.
• Full support for Scottish Rate of Income Tax (SRIT) codes.
• The new NI category H is available for apprentices under 25 in qualifying circumstances. Payments to class H employees are not liable to Class 1 secondary NICs.
• With the abolishment of Contracted Out Pension, HMRC have discontinued NI categories D, E, K, I and L. When importing from BrightPay 2015/16, employees in any of these categories are moved into the equivalent non-contracting-out category.
• Support for Plan 1 and Plan 2 Student Loan deductions.
• Ability to process 2016/17 coding notices.
• Eligible employers can continue to claim the £3,000 Employment Allowance which can be used to reduce Employer Class 1 Secondary NICs payments to HMRC.
• Updated P11, P45, P60, P30 and P32 forms.
• Updated RTI submissions in line with the latest HMRC specifications. BrightPay continues to be officially HMRC Recognised for all RTI submission types.

Expenses and Benefits

BrightPay 2016/17 allows you to record all types of reportable expenses and benefits that you provide to your employees:

BrightPay can produce a P11D for sending to HMRC after year end which includes your Class 1A NICs declaration and details of the expenses and benefits provided including cash equivalents.

If you register for payrolling of benefits by 5 April 2016, BrightPay 2016/17 also supports calculating the PAYE on expenses and benefits in each pay period.

We will be back-porting some of the expenses and benefits features to BrightPay 2015/16 to allow you to send your P11D for the 2015/16 tax year. Look out for an upgrade in April/May.

Note: Expenses/benefits and P11D are not available for Free Licence customers.

Construction Industry Scheme (CIS)

BrightPay 2016/17 has full support for paying subcontractors under the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS):

• Add/edit subcontractors, or import from CSV.
• Pay subcontractors tax weekly or tax monthly (all year or part year).
• Customisable basic pay, daily rates, hourly rates, additions, deductions, etc.
• Record cost of materials and VAT.
• Calculate CIS deduction amounts according to subcontractor's tax payment status.
• Print, export to PDF, or email Subcontractor Payment and Deduction Statements.
• Send CISREQ subcontractor verification submissions and apply response data.
• Send CIS300 monthly returns.
• BrightPay tracks the number of unsent CIS submissions, similar to RTI.
• Report on CIS data in BrightPay Analysis (some built-in CIS reports are available)

Note: CIS is not available for Free Licence customers.

Pensions and Automatic Enrolment

If you have not yet entered your Automatic Enrolment Staging Date in BrightPay, you can now connect directly to the Pensions Regulator and retrieve it automatically from within BrightPay.

BrightPay 2016/17 now tracks the number of enrolment/contributions submissions that you have not yet submitted to your pension scheme provider. The number is shown on the main PENSIONS tab, and contributes to the total number shown on the Open Employer screen (which also includes RTI and CIS).

We'll be continuing to update Automatic Enrolment during the 2016/17 tax year and provide dedicated support for more pension scheme providers.

Coming Soon: BrightPay Cloud

BrightPay Cloud will allow you to connect your BrightPay employer data to a web based service that provides:

Secure Online Backup

Automatically backs up your BrightPay data to the cloud. A historical set of backups is maintained. Your data file can be restored from an online backup at any time.

Employee Self-Service

Enables employees to log in to a web-based portal using their PC, Mac or smartphone to retrieve payslips, view their calendar, request annual leave, view/update personal information, and more.

Bureau Client Self-Service

Enables payroll bureaux to provide an online portal not only for their customer's employees (i.e. employee self-service as described above), but also an employer portal for direct use by their  employer customers, enabling them to view payroll reports, P30s, calendar, all employee information, and more.

BrightPay Cloud will work directly with BrightPay 2016/17, but also allow you to upload your BrightPay 2015/16 data to immediately have a full year of historical data to power the self-service features.

BrightPay Cloud will cost £49 per employer per tax year (with discounted bulk pricing for bureaux also available).

We'll have more news very soon. As a BrightPay customer, you'll be the first to know. Watch this space!

Other 2016/17 Changes in BrightPay

• Ability to import employees from an FPS XML file.
• When importing from HMRC Basic PAYE Tools, you can choose to do so from the previous tax year or the current tax year.
• Pension-able gross can be split into separate employee and employer pension-able gross amounts.
• Basic pay, daily pay and hourly pay can now be explicitly flagged as liable/not-liable to PAYE, NICs, employee pension, and employer pension.
• Additional Statutory Paternity Pay is no longer relevant and is removed in BrightPay 2016/17.
• The NIC Upper Accrual Point is no longer relevant and is removed from BrightPay 2016/17.
• New wider range of built-in reports.
• Pension provider enrolment/contributions submissions and file formats have been updated to the latest versions.
• Ability to view submission logs for NEST web service submissions.
• An HMRC payment date is no longer required to be able to progress to the next HMRC pay period. Any pay period can be clicked into at any time.
• Ability to report on HMRC payment amounts in Analysis.
• Employee passwords can be randomly generated.
• Lots of minor improvements throughout the entire BrightPay user interface, as well as the latest bug fixes.

BrightPay 16/17 is the same price as BrightPay 15/16 (including FREE for small employers with up to three employees). Support will continue to be free of charge for all users.

Posted byRoss WebsterinPayroll SoftwareSoftware Upgrade