December 2011 update

With Christmas just days away, we are at the end of the development cycle for the next payroll release, v4.21. This will, as usual, be a mandatory update for those of you who use Uniwage, and will also be supplied to those of you who don't soon after.

As well as handling RTI in preparation for the pilot in April 2012 (as discussed in my last post), we are also well ahead of the game with the Workplace Pension Reforms that are due to begin in 2012. In truth, it is the largest companies who will start in 2012, with some smaller companies not starting until as late as 2015. However, Uniwage now contains everything you need to enter your Staging Date and to automatically enrol employees once the time comes.

We held our annual User Group Meeting in Rugby in November, and as well as being able to tell the delegates about what was coming up, we were also able to listen to what you had to say. One payroll issue that was very popular on people's wish-list was to improve the Fixed Countdown Deductions.

Currently, you can enter the total payment and the regular payment, and it will continue to deduct this until the total is cleared. Now, you have the option to enter a number of periods over which you would like the deduction to be paid off. Uniwage will calculate the regular payment, including taking more in the first period to ensure the deduction is fully cleared within the timeframe.

By far the biggest change available to everyone in v4.21 will be the introduction of the SMP Schedule. This will mark the end of having to calculate SMP each period. Instead, the entire payment schedule is calculated up front. This means you can provide your employees with a clear schedule of what they can expect to be paid, as well as making it easier for you each period by removing the SMP Calculation & Transfer routines. Employees who are currently on SMP will be converted to the SMP Schedule method during your first payroll calculation with v4.21.

If you are on the mailing list for our newsletters, then you may have seen that HMRC are extending the pilot for RTI. Currently, we are 1 of only 40 payroll software providers (out of over 300) who are involved within the pilot, along with some of our customers (from April 2012). More customers have expressed an interest in taking part from the new pilot dates, which are in July and November 2012. If you would like to get ahead of the game on RTI, then contact Emma Clare with your details.

All that remains is to wish our customers and readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. See you in 2012!

September '11 Update

This being only the second post of the year illustrates how busy we have been and how difficult it has been to find time to keep you updated on development here at Carval. I always planned to keep this updated at least once a month and will endeavour to get back to that timeframe.

In the last entry, I mentioned that Carval had been shortlisted for a Small Business of the Year Award. You may have seen it reported back in April that we indeed won that award, a great achievement for the hard work and expertise put in by the Carval team over the past few years, turbulent as they have been for everyone.

At that time, v4.18 had just been released, which contained all the legislative changes for the 2011/12 tax year. Since then, we worked on some internal and structural changes to the software which formed the unreleased v4.19. We are currently in beta testing of v4.20, which will contain, amongst other features:

General

• Mail Merge - now uses the built-in report writer to give much more control over printing, saving and emailing merged documents, and saving them to employees' records. (Microsoft Word mail merge is still supported).
• Report Scheduler - dynamic date selection for report parameters (e.g. show all absence records entered a week ago up to today, where "today" is the date on which the report will run)
• Workflow - set up a flow of tasks to assign to employees, visible to them in HR Unity (Windows) or HR Unity Online (Self Service)
• Employee Information Popup - view vital information about any employee with just a click
• User defined columns on the Employee Search 
• Lookup search now, optionally, allows "obsolete" codes to be seen
• Bank Holiday exceptions by year
• Spinal Column Point "Mid points"

HR

• Company Dashboard - graphs and metrics on the company or companies you have selected
• Driving Licence screens, including Licence Categories.
• Improved security for payroll fields in HR

Payroll

• Data Provisioning Service - ability to run more than one tax reference at a time
• In Year Movements Internet Filing - added to HR Unity Scheduler

Self Service

• Online Payment Requests
• T&A Supervisor functions (such as being able to see and add clockings, make shift changes and add Overtime Authorisation and Worked Meal Breaks)
• View Policies and Forms online

v4.20 is due for release in October.

Work has already started on v4.21, which is the legislative release for the 2012/13 tax year. As well as making the required changes to calculate your payroll correctly, we will also be working on HMRC's new Real-Time Information (RTI) update for payroll. Uniwage has been selected to pilot this scheme for the 2012/13 tax year along with half a dozen of our customers. This will not affect anyone else for the coming year, but it will mean that Uniwage is fully ready for RTI when it goes live for you from April 2013 onwards.

RTI is designed to ultimately replace the Intenret Filing of End of Year (P14, P35) and In Year (P45, P46) forms.

HMRC have also decided to drop the Payroll Standard award that they have created back in 2002. Carval were one of the first payroll software providers to get on board with the Payroll Standard and were involved in early workshops to shape it. We are disappointed that this decision has been taken, as only 55 out of 300 payroll software developers were accredited which meant that Uniwage was part of an elite list of providers who had committed to proving their software has undergone the rigorous testing by HMRC. The Payroll Standard will end on April 2012, at which point we must remove the logo and any reference to it. Rest assured, this does not mean we will not be keeping our software up to the high standard you have come to expect.

Also, you may have heard that Microsoft are planning to release a new version of Windows next year, Windows 8. It is important to us and our customers that our software will continue to work with the very latest Windows, and so Carval have obtained a Developer Preview edition of this operating system. I can confirm that HR Unity installs and works with no problems, as you would expect.

April '11 update

Apologies for this being the first post of 2011. As payroll software providers, the first few months of the year is an exceptionally busy time, ensuring the payroll software is complete and tested. Everyone using Uniwage, and most of you using Unistaff and/or Unitend, will now be using HR Unity v4.18.1.

You may have read that there have been changes to Statutory Paternity Pay (SPP) that are effective from this new tax year. If the mother chooses to go back to work early, her parter can take up the rest of what would have been her Maternity Pay (SMP), as Additional SPP. Being a Payroll Standard approved product, Uniwage v4.18 supports this right out of the box.


For many, this will be the first release with the new reports and reporting structure, including the new report scheduler. We have already have some very positive feedback on this, as well as some interesting ideas for the future. We will be looking to improve on this area in v4.19.

In other news, you may have seen that HMRC have committed to going ahead with the Real-Time Information initiative, or RTI, which is intended to improve the operation of PAYE. Carval have always been at the forefront of these HMRC projects, and we have elected to take part of the pilot that starts in April 2012. Read more about it on our main site's blog, where there is also a call for customers who would like to take part with us.

Finally, Carval has been shortlisted down to the final 3 for a Small Business of the Year award. The awards ceremony is on 14th April.

December '10 update

At the beginning of December, v4.17 was released to a handful of customers, principally dealing with the new payroll bureau functionality that has been introduced. Many of the enhancements made may be of benefit to all payroll users, but this limited release allows us to ensure everything is working as expected before the main payroll release comes out next February/March.

Some things you can look forward to that were introduced in v4.17 are:

• Scheduling of the HMRC Data Provisioning Service (DPS)
• Fast-switching of Payroll Groups
• Submit In-Year Movements to HMRC added to the Scheduler
• Reports added to the Scheduler

This was also the first release in which all of the standard reports were issued having been rewritten in ReportBuilder, the same tool provided to you as standard with the software. This has enabled us to schedule reports as mentioned above, plus provide other enhancements, such as exporting to PDF.

Development is now almost complete on v4.18, the annual payroll release that will be sent to all Uniwage customers next year. This will, of course, handle the new National Insurance threshold being introduced in the 2011-12 tax year, as well as:

• New Additional Statutory Paternity Pay (ASPP) calculation
• New Standardised Child Maintenance Deduction of Earnings Order (DEO) Schedule extract

We have also had approval today from HMRC to produce our own Substitute P60 form which means that we can offer our own layout for printing the P60 form to be given to employees at the end of the tax year. From April 2011, if you wish, you are allowed to give this form to the employee electronically (PDF in an email, like electronic payslips), avoiding a long print run and expensive paper and printer costs. This form can still be printed by the employee, if needed, which is why it must be an HMRC approved substitute form.

Finally, Merry Christmas to all of our customers, enjoy the break if you're getting one, and have a Happy New Year.

February 2010 update

Last week, v4.13.0, the annual payroll release, went live. Uniwage customers should be receiving this soon (if not already). If you do not have Uniwage but would still like v4.13, contact the support team.

v4.14 was intended to be a general maintenance release, containing some new features we've been designing for a while, as well as fixing any issues currently logged on the system. It now looks as though this will be pushed out much sooner than expected (possibly even the end of this week), as some bespoke enhancements requested by a customer require the database changes made in v4.14. Therefore this will not be on general release and is not a significant release.

The next general maintenance release then is likely to be v4.15.

One thing to note is that we are soon looking to move to a newer version of our development environment, Delphi. We have been happy with Delphi 6 for many years now as it is stable and well supported. But recently, this 10 year old software has started to show its age and some of the tools we use in it are moving forward without us. We already have purchased a copy of the latest Delphi, but we just have to overcome some migration issues before we can commit to it. When this begins, it will take us a while to move everything over and we will more than likely release HR Unity as v5.0 when this is complete.

This will only affect the Windows software, the HR Unity Online ("Self Service") will remain unaffected.

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.

November '09 - v4.13

As I wrote earlier this month, v4.12 has been released. This was not a widespread release as it primarily concentrated on new T&A features and enhancements. With v4.13 being a mandatory payroll release, it was considered not to ship this small version out when everyone using payroll will have to install v4.13.

Obviously, then, this version will concentrate on payroll in preparation for tax year 2010/11. One major addition to the general package (although it requires Unistaff HR to use it) is called Previous Service. If an employee leaves and comes back, then his or her previous employment duration is available for use. This is cumulative where employees regularly leave and rejoin over the years. This Previous Service duration can optionally then be used in Length of Service calculations, in addition to the employee's current length of service.

A nice new addition to the HR Unity Online (Self Service) module will be the ability to request a recurring absence. So, for example, if an employee has a course every other Wednesday starting in January for 12 weeks, this can be requested en-bloc and, once accepted, the individual absences will be entered.

Payroll changes include:

• Maternity Pay Schemes: Now uses Length of Service for different payment rules, including the option to include the new Previous Service duration.
• P14/P60 layout: Paper and Internet form changes to cater for the new "UAP" NI band.
• P35 Internet Filing: Now supports Cessation Date for companies who have ceased trading.
  
• P11D Internet Filing: Will now consolidate the submission if an employee with Exp & Ben had left and rejoined.
• Deduction Codes: As well as Value or Percentage (of Gross Pay) type codes, Percentage of Gross Pay Scheme has been added as an option.
• VAT rate added to Government Parameters.
  
• Expenses Input has been improved to allow the user to view the inputs for just the selected employee or for the group; Improved grid showing totals; Auto-calculates VAT.
  
• Mileages Input uses the same improved grid to show totals.
• Attachment of Earnings Maintenance screen has been redesigned to make it easier to use, and performs more automatic tasks for you (such as creating the related Fixed Deduction code).

As usual, this is also the time of year where we apply for reaccreditation of the Payroll Standard and Pensioner Standard. This includes having the P14/P35 internet filing "recognised", and now this includes In-Year Movements as well (P45s, P46s). We have been a long-standing holder of the Payroll Standard and have continually supported almost all of the Internet Filing forms that are available.

We are also very proud of our low error-rate statistics for internet filing (provided to us by HMRC) and in v4.13, we have added further validation checks to the data to ensure this error rate continues to remain low. This ultimately means that you can file your forms online faster without having to correct your data and resubmit.

v4.13 is currently in testing and we will be looking for a February release, once the Payroll Standard has been confirmed.

August 09 - More news of v4.11

In the last posting, it was pointed out that emailed payslips (in PDF format) can, from v4.11, go to a different specified address other than the employee's work address.

In addition to this, we have added an optional security feature. The PDF file can now be password protected. This is a payroll group-wide setting, and if activated then the password can either be set to the employee's National Insurance number or their Self Service password (if Self Service is installed).

We are trying very hard to make email payslips a useable and useful feature, in an effort to save you money and, in general terms, save paper. These additions in v4.11 should go a long way to encouraging your organisation to take up this feature.

Important changes to forthcoming releases

There are two important changes coming to forthcoming releases, that you should be aware of.

v4.10 - Giro credits
In the next version to be released, support for the Giro Credit payment type in Uniwage has been dropped. To our knowledge this payment type is no longer being used and it has been removed to make way for the new Foreign Currency payment type which is a new feature of v4.10 Uniwage.

v4.11 - Screen Resolution
Since the first version, HR Unity has been developed for a minimum screen resolution of 800x600, which was the norm 10 years ago. Many recent surveys show that the most popular screen resolution is now 1280x1024, followed by 1024x768. According to one survey , less than 1% of users are still running a desktop as small as 800x600. Whilst this may not seem significant, the fact that most of you are probably running at higher resolutions means that we're not exploiting the screen real-estate you have. Therefore, from v4.11, we will raise our minimum screen resolution to 1024x768.

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.

January '09

A slightly belated Happy New Year from the development team at Carval. December and January have been a very busy period as we finalise the "statutory" payroll release for the new tax year.

v4.9.0 is going out to beta test site today after a month of internal testing, part of which involves getting accredited again for the Payroll Standard. All of the details are now with HMRC and we are just waiting for confirmation.

Furthermore, we're adding recognition for the new Online Filing form types that we are adding this year: P46(Pen), P46(Expat) and P46(Car).

We've taken some great steps in making this area of the payroll easier to use. In-Year Movements (i.e. P45s and P46s) now record which employees were submitted, so the Internet Filing Audit report can show you the status of every submission you make and which employees were in that submission.

We have also added an indicator on the employee's record to show whether their P45/P46 has been filed online yet or not (see image).

Starter details that have not yet been filed online can now also been removed, in case they were entered in error.

New screens have been added to Uniwage for maintenance and calculation of Salary Sacrifice schemes, and there is a new report called the Input Listing, which does for payroll inputs what the current Deduction Listing does for deductions.

Also, Fixed Inputs and Fixed Deductions can now be changed for groups of employees at once, as they have been added to the Global Update facility.

v4.9 will be available for release once we have confirmation of the Payroll Standard accreditation and recognition of all of the Online Filing forms.

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.

v4.4.0 out, v4.5 underway

Version 4.4.0 was released on schedule at the beginning of this month and so development has begun on v4.5, the "statutory release". As mentioned in the previous post, there will be a large focus on Expenses & Benefits as we rewrite and modernise the system.

We have already identified the main payroll changes that need to be made for the 2008/09 tax year and of course these will be done in conjunction with the Payroll Standard.

One area that we are keen to concentrate on is cars. Currently the car benefits in Unistaff don't link to the cars in the Expenses & Benefits module, which is going to be rectified in this release. The cars will be consolidated into one area that can be used both in HR and Expenses & Benefits.

We appreciate that there is only one area currently in Unistaff where you can enter car details. What we would like to know is how do you use the cars in HR (under Company Benefits Car Details)? Are you using them to hold private car details, even though it is designed for benefits only?

Part of linking car benefits to the P11Ds means that cars that are not a benefit cannot be held in this Car Details area any more, otherwise they'll end up feeding through to the P11Ds. What information should we keep? Just the car registration or more?

We would strongly suggest that you mark any cars entered on this screen, that are not a benefit, as non company cars by clearing the tick box as shown here. This way we will be able to differentiate between the cars entered on that screen that are a benefit and those that are not.

v4.4 and onwards

The technical team recently met to discuss the development plan (or "roadmap" as the kids call it these days) for the next 6-8 months. It begins with the currently developed version, v4.4.0.

v4.4 will contain just short of 70 new features, enhancements and issue resolutions. Not least among the new features will be:

• "Groups" of companies - providing a top-level grouping of one or more companies.
• Absence Allowances - allowing any absence type, not just holidays, to have a limit for the year.
• Analysis of Tax & NI for multi-post employees in different departments and cost centres in the nominal extract and departmental analysis
• Audit Trail report will no longer use run numbers that many of you didn't like - instead we will allow the user to filter by dates and optionally by users, to only show the audit trail items you're looking for (and now in the order they happened, not in table order).

v4.4. will also see some significant speed increases in some areas of the software on larger systems. We have concentrated our efforts on the custom report writer in this version and the result is that both the report designer and the printing of those user-defined reports are now almost instantaneous, whereas we were aware of some significant delays in previous versions. Delays on the payroll calculation screen and the pre-calculation checks in Uniwage have also been tackled.

We are going to pass v4.4 over to the testing team at the end of August and are looking to have it ready for you at the start of October.

In the meantime, v4.5.0 will be the annual statutory release for Uniwage payroll. Not only will we look into the effects of the removal of the 10% tax band, but we are also going to concentrate our efforts on the Expenses & Benefits module. Much of this will be behind-the-scenes design but the overall effect of that will be a speed increase as well as the removal of the limit of 5 cars or loans.

In addition we will be bringing together the vehicles in Expenses & Benefits with those in Unistaff Car Benefits to reduce potential duplication of data. This will be just one part of a more significant series of enhancements under the umbrella of "flexible benefits".

On top of that we have to ensure that the product meets the reaccreditation of the Payroll Standard and that the various internet filing forms are re-recognised for the sixth consecutive year. You may have seen in the newsletter or in certain trade magazines that our error rate in last year's End Of Year filing was 0.07% compared to the national average of 3.8% and we will be adding extra validation to the payroll to try and reduce this further.

There are literally dozens of other enhancements to the product that cannot be discussed at this point until they have been definitively completed - but rest assured that these are designed to improve your experience with the HR Unity software and nearly all of them are as a result of customer feedback. We are listening to you and the next few releases will demonstrate that.

Release of v4.3 and Internet Filing statistics 2006/07

Version 4.3.0

Last week saw the release of HR Unity v4.3.0. This version was issued earlier than anticipated as we had addressed some speed issues with the software and wanted to ensure users could use this faster version earlier than the planned release date of September/October. Specifically, the areas we address speed concerns were:

• Uniwage payroll sick pay screen
• Unistaff/Unitend Select Company dialog box.
• Employee Maintenance in all 3 modules but especially Unistaff HR.

Some other new features we had added when we decided to release this version were:

• Previous Employment screen added to Unistaff Employee History. As well as holding user entered information, the Recruitment module also populates this for new starters.
• Supervisor Enquiry in Unitend has a new option to include ignored clockings. Traditionally it excludes ignored clockings and will continue to do so unless this new option is turned on. The Supervisor Enquiry can now also be cancelled during its run if you do not want it to continue.

Internet Filing statistics 2006/07

The individual company statistics are out for the 2006/07 EOY filing and they make good reading for Carval Uniwage. We processed more P14s than in any of the previous 5 years that we have been able to file electronically, and the error rate is down to less than half of one percent.

The average error rate for all payroll products last year was in excess of 2%; last year Uniwage's error rate was 1.3% and this year it is 0.07% (that's 851 less errors than last year in real terms, down to only 26 in over 35,500 P14s). This is due to Uniwage's improved error handling and trapping throughout the year and at year-end to ensure that your data goes through without having to deal with rejected submissions.

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.