RTI - best practice
The first year of PAYE Real Time Information (RTI) has been treated as a trial period, as employers and HMRC have had to work out how to deal with unusual situations.
The biggest problem for many employers has been how to send a full payment summary (FPS) on or before the day they pay casual workers, when the amount due isn’t determined until the end of the workers' shift. The answer is to take advantage of the concession to make the FPS up to seven days after the payment date. This concession will continue to operate in 2014/15 and subsequent years.
Overtime payments can mess up the calculations, as those figures are often not reported to the person running the payroll until after the FPS is submitted. A solution is to reduce the period between sending the FPS and making the payment to the employees. Ideally these two tasks should take place on the same day.
However, if that is not possible you can make adjustments to amounts reported as paid to employees after the FPS has been submitted. You can even do this the next time the payroll is run. However, you need to remember to pay the PAYE as reported due on the FPS for the month, not the amount due including the missed overtime payment.
If you have any other problems with processing odd payments under RTI, please discuss the issue with us first, rather than doing something that seems sensible – but may lead to problems with HMRC.