From April 2013, employers will be changing the way they tell HMRC about payments and associated tax deductions made to employees. From this date employees will include all students and casual staff as the relevant procedures for those types of staff will be withdrawn. Payments to lower paid, temporary staff and irregular staff will also need to be reported.

With the start of RTI being just two months away, have you considered your obligations under this?

What should you do now?

1. You should start by making sure that if you use a payroll software, it is compliant with RTI. If you prepare your payroll manually, you will need to find a software solution. Alternatively, you could consider outsourcing your payroll, this may free up valuable time to run other aspects of your business. We run payrolls for many of our clients using well informed staff so consider asking us for a quotation.
2. You need to check your data is correct. You should review your records and ask employees to confirm that the data you hold is correct. This will include:

Full name i.e. “Jonathan Martin Clarke” not “Jon M Clarke”;

National Insurance Number;

Gender;

Date of birth; and

Address.

1. If you pay your employees by BACS using your own Service User Number (SUN) you must ensure that your software includes the RTI cross reference or hash field. If you pay without your own SUN you will not need to do this. More information here.
2. As soon as your payroll software supports the facility, you will need to start to include new information such as hours worked for example. More information here.

Consider using the HMRC Business Readiness Checklist to help you make sure you have covered everything.

HMRC regularly provide RTI updates on their news feed on the website and we will continue to include updates on our own news feed. If you have not already done so, take a look at our .

Your contact at Edwin Smith can assist you with questions you may have.