January 2010 update

Belated Happy New Year from the Carval development team. We're working on the finishing touches to v4.13 as we speak. This is the annual compulsory payroll update release that also contains plenty of new features that I spoke about before.

Although you would expect this from us, it is worth mentioning that we recently had our accreditation for the Payroll Standard confirmed for the eighth successive year. We're very proud of our long list of recognised internet filing forms and we were also pleased that HMRC personally recognised our very low error rate for End-of-Year filing. We're now working hard to ensure the same low error rate for In-Year filing.

It also might be of interest to you that we're now finally on Twitter. Our sales & marketing team are looking for new ways to keep customers updated with news of what is going on at Carval. We're making some changes so that our website is kept more up to date with news & events, as well as using other sources - so check us out, we're @CarvalComputing.

January '09 Update

We have received confirmation this morning that we have been granted re-accreditation of the Payroll Standard for the seventh consecutive year. As well as being a measure of the quality of Uniwage, it demonstrates our committment to ensuring that your payroll is accurate.

In addition to this accreditation, we have also learnt this week that we have achieved re-recognition for the following Online Filing forms:

• P14
• P35
• P11D
• P11Db
• P45(1)
• P45(3)
• P46

Not content with that array of forms, we have also gained recognition for 3 brand new forms introduced this year:

• P46(Pen)
• P46(Expat)
• P46(Car)

This isn't other payroll software product available that offers more online forms than Uniwage.

Latest on v4.5.0

This newest release of the HR Unity software, v4.5.0, is what we term the "statutory release" for the forthcoming 2008/09 tax year. At the very least, the Uniwage payroll software is updated to handle changes in legislation and changes to what is calculated in payroll, and how that might be achieved.

This release is no exception, but this time we have concentrated on 2 areas: Expenses & Benefits, and the appearance of the software. As you would also expect, Internet filing recogntition has been achieved for End of Year and the Payroll Standard has been re-approved for the sixth consecutive year.

Expenses & Benefits

This module has been rewritten from the very beginning. A lot of what was in there before has gone, and almost everything that remains has been improved. The endeavour has been to make it simpler to use and more informative. Take, for example, the new P11D Summary:

This screen (click the image to view it full size) provides a simple overview for the selected employee, listing the expenses & benefits recorded against him or her and providing a total. This can be printed for the employee.

Also evident from this screen shot is the introduction of user-defined colour schemes which is a new feature in v4.5, both in the Expenses & Benefits module and the HR Unity software in general. This can be set at either a global level (to match your company colour scheme for example) and optionally at user-level.


The P11D Entry screen has been simplified so that users now only see the figures that they are required to enter. Although the previous versions showed all of the workings, it was often reported that this was confusing and so the decision was taken to reduce the amount of information shown, as seen in this image:

This screen shot of the P11D car entry form (working sheet 2) shows the reduced amount of information that is presented. However, note the hyperlink at the bottom of the window: "How was this calculated?". For each of the six working sheets, this link is presented when the total benefit charge is calculated. This will open a new window that details, step by step, how the figures were achieved. This can be directly correlated to the P11D Working Sheets themselves.

Other significant additions or changes to v4.5.0 are:

• Improved New Employee Wizard: this is now the only way to insert a new employee directly and the wizard has been significantly enhanced to reflect the importance of this task.
• Unistaff. Personal vehicles in HR are now recorded differently to company cars. Company cars are still recorded in the Company Benefits section (and are linked to the vehicles in the Expenses & Benefits module); personal cars can be recorded against the employee's record. Please read the release notice on your v4.5 CDs to appreciate the implications of this fully.
• Unistaff. A new field is available under Company Rules that allows the company eligibility period for pensions to be defined. This is used by the New Employee Wizard where appropriate to set the employee’s Pension Eligibility Date for new starters.
• Unistaff. The existing Registration Number Enquiry report did not allow for partial matching and only searched for cars entered on the Company BenefitsCar Details screen. This report has been removed and replaced by an improved enquiry that allows for partial number plates to be matched, and searches both the vehicle fleet and personal car details. The details are matching cars are returned and where known, the owner and the colour of the car.
• Absence. Absence Allowance schemes can now be tracked on a rolling year basis.
• Uniwage. Leavers can now be entered before their actual leave period, and if the leave date is in a future tax periodthen they will remain a live employee until the appropriate Period End marks them as a leaver.
• Uniwage. If a leaver has to be reinstated for a payment after he or she has left, an extra option is now provided to ask whether this employee is returning for good or whether this is for a one-off payment. If the latter is selected, the employee will be marked as a leaver again by the subsequent Period End.
• Uniwage. A report is now available of all internet filing submissions made.
• Event Diary. The Diary Manager scheduler screen has a new option called "Attach iCal file". If ticked then an iCal file is attached to the email (if an email is being sent). An iCal file is an industry standard calendar export file that is supported by most (if not all) calendar products on the market. This option has been added to the software for those customers who do not use Microsoft Outlook so that they can receive the diary entries as an email attachment and then import that file into their calendar application of choice.

v4.5.0 has completed the in-house testing and is currently under beta testing. It is slated for release in the middle of February 2008.

Carval involved in Payroll Standard consultation

This week I attended a consultation meeting with the HMRC on the future of the Payroll Standard. For those customers that chose our Uniwage payroll product within the last 4 or 5 years, it was no doubt a significant factor in the decision making process that Carval is one of the products officially accredited by HMRC (although it should be clarified that this is not an endorsement by HMRC).

In fact Carval were one of the first payroll providers in the country to achieve the full Payroll Standard 5 years ago and now there are exactly 100 other suppliers on the market with Standard. There are many more that do not have the Standard and it is not mandatory but we believe that it is important to be seen to be accredited by the Revenue because it provides peace of mind for our customers that we get the basics right.

This week’s consultation was a review of the Payroll Standard which is now eight years old. Because Carval was an “early adopter” of this process, we felt that it was important to keep on top of potential changes to it, which is why I attended. Indeed, it is not the first time we have been involved in HMRC’s workshops and consultations for payroll software; I was involved in the changes made from the old “Secure Messaging Service” (SMS) to the “Data Provisioning Service” (DPS) which handles your in-year forms electronically. This is why we were able to provide our payroll customers with a solution before almost anyone else, because we were privy to the changes that were forthcoming. Certainly we were amongst the first payroll providers in the UK to be “recognised” for it.

So what was the purpose of this meeting? Well, it turns out that not every payroll provider in the country believes the Payroll Standard achieves what it set out to accomplish. For many, it is too complex for smaller systems and contains tests and hurdles that smaller companies won’t ever need; and for others it is not complex enough, only scratching the surface of the needs of their payroll customers.

I think it is important to set out my position on this. Personally, I believe the Payroll Standard to be A Good Thing but I have come to realise that is because of the customers we have and the marketplace we provide for. It is certainly true that some of the goals of the Standard go far further than any payroll provider should have to go as a “minimum” but then, Uniwage isn’t a payroll product that just gives you the minimum. As the consultation progressed, I was beginning to think that only our product was capable of delivering what was in the Payroll Standard, and developers were asking for things to be removed from the Standard that we have been doing even before the Standard was introduced! But for Carval, the Standard fits the software perfectly and with the introduction of “aggregation of earnings” in v4.0 we moved even further ahead of most of the crowd.

However, the day was a learning curve for me as I understood that a lot of small businesses did not even know that there was a Payroll Standard or did not understand what it meant. It is certainly true that the wording of it for the employers is too verbose and dense and a good section of the day was spent trying to reduce the number of points by combining some or removing some all together, whilst clearing up the wording.

HMRC also came under fire for their website with almost unanimous agreement that it was too difficult to find the list of accredited products and suppliers. This, too, will be up for review by them.

I’m not sure I am in a position to outline the changes that were discussed, nor am I convinced you’d want to read them! After all, you already use a payroll product that has been accredited since 2003 and is capable of sending and receiving 16 forms electronically. And you can be sure that no matter what changes HMRC make to the Payroll Standard, Carval will be ensuring Uniwage doesn’t just provide our customers with the minimum.