As if doing business wasn’t tough enough in these unpredictable times, the new financial year has brought yet another challenge to hard-pressed businesses – the eye-watering rise in Employer’s National Insurance (ER’s NI) contributions announced in the autumn budget.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves chose to hoik secondary Class 1 ER’s NI up to 15 per cent for the majority of employees and, at the same time, reduced the level at which employers start paying NIC – the secondary threshold – from £9,100 to £5,000 a year. According to accountancy and payroll firm Sage, these changes will increase the cost of employing staff for nearly a million – 940,000 – UK businesses. With increases also to the minimum wage, the year ahead will be the most expensive on record for any businesses employing minimum wage staff.
This means that, more than ever, it makes sense to take a close look at your day-to-day processes and ensure you are operating as efficiently as possible. We’ve put together a few tips that may help.
1 Make use of the Employment Allowance
The budget brought a bit of good news in the form of the Employment Allowance, which now allows employers to claim up to £10,500 pa against the cost of their NIC liability, up from £5,000 in the previous tax year. The eligibility bar of £100,000 has also been removed, so employers of all sizes can now benefit. For a smaller company, this could offset the cost of the entire ER’s NI bill, so make sure you claim the allowance each year.
2 Pay attention to timesheets
With every working hour counting towards your bottom line, you need to be sure that you are not inadvertently paying staff over the odds – and that means taking a long, hard look at your timesheets. Are you able to track workers’ movements to the minute and precise location and are you sure your payments are accurate to the nearest penny? Or are you still using paper-based records or relying on hit and miss figures and near-enough payments? If it’s the latter, it is worth considering upgrading to a more accurate and reliable electronic system that saves time, offers greater control over your wage bill and helps prevent overspends.
3 Take advantage of the latest attendance software
The low cost of technology means that monitoring workers’ hours and calculating timesheets quickly and reliably with specialist attendance software is within reach of even the smallest company. easyLog’s range of foolproof clocking apps can to be used with employees’ own phones or an ordinary tablet, keeping outlay to an absolute minimum. And clockings are backed-up by geolocation coordinates and other in-built security features so attendance is always recorded accurately for fast and reliable timesheet and pay management. There are attendance recording options for all workers and locations, from simple PIN and drop-down menus to QR code apps and biometric face recognition, all for a small monthly charge based on the number of app users.
4 Update rota management
Rota software that allows you to schedule staff according to your finances can be a real benefit when money is tight. Our rota software has lots of time and money saving options and works seamlessly with our attendance recording apps to make calculating pay correctly fast and simple. Useful options include the ability to allocate staff according to a budget, recording of sickness, holiday and other absences and easy management of flexible and minimum hours and multiple pay rates.
5 Make the most of reports
Our software comes with report options to make managing timesheets, costings and pay more accurate and efficient than before. For example, the “Costed” report allows users to define a pay rate per hour per person and then automatically add up a costed timesheet – handy for comparing against contractors’ invoices and keeping control of your expenditure. You can read more about reports here.
Get in touch
To find the right easyLog software for your employees, talk to one of our team on 01892 834406 or request a callback using the form on this page.
