Payroll. Done right.

For most small employers, outsourcing payroll costs less than running it in-house once you count the real price of doing it yourself. The visible cost is software, an hour or two of admin each pay run, and the cost of the person doing it. The hidden cost is the penalty exposure: HMRC charges an automatic monthly penalty for every late Full Payment Submission, and those add up fast across a tax year.

Our payroll sits inside fixed monthly plans, so the price does not move with the number of pay runs or jump at year-end. You are paying for the filing being right and on time, not by the hour. The table below shows what HMRC charges per month when an FPS is late, which is the cost most in-house setups quietly carry.

There is also a saving most employers miss. The Employment Allowance lets eligible businesses cut their secondary Class 1 National Insurance bill by up to £10,500 in 2026/27, claimed through your Employer Payment Summary. We claim it correctly from the first pay run so it is not left on the table, and we confirm you are still eligible each year, because the rules exclude some single-director companies.

If you want to compare your current in-house cost against a fixed monthly plan, book a free Tax Health Check and we will run the numbers on your actual headcount.

A monthly payroll run is a fixed sequence tied to two HMRC deadlines: the Full Payment Submission on or before each pay date, and the PAYE payment by the 22nd of the following month if you pay electronically (the 19th if you pay by post). Miss the first and you risk a late-filing penalty. Miss the second and HMRC charges interest and can add late-payment penalties.

Each cycle we collect your variable inputs (hours, overtime, bonuses, starters and leavers), calculate gross to net, run the auto-enrolment pension assessment, and file the FPS to HMRC before payday. We then tell you the single figure to pay HMRC and the date it is due, so there are no surprises mid-month.

A worked example. Take one employee on an annual salary of £30,000, paid monthly. That is £2,500 gross a month. Income tax is charged once pay passes the £12,570 personal allowance, and employee National Insurance once weekly pay passes the £242 primary threshold. On the employer side, secondary Class 1 NIC is 15% on earnings above the secondary threshold of £96 a week (around £5,000 a year). Before the Employment Allowance, that employer NIC is roughly £3,750 across the year on this salary. If you are eligible for the Employment Allowance, the first £10,500 of that secondary NIC bill is wiped out, so a small employer with one or two staff often pays no employer NIC at all.

If you run payroll less often, there is relief on the payment side too. Employers who usually owe HMRC less than £1,500 a month can ask to pay PAYE quarterly rather than monthly, which eases cash flow. We confirm whether you qualify and arrange it.

Yes, you can change payroll provider at any point in the tax year, not just in April. The work is in carrying your year-to-date figures across cleanly so HMRC's Real Time Information record stays continuous and your employees' tax and National Insurance keep calculating correctly.

We take over by collecting your latest FPS, the year-to-date pay, tax, NIC and pension figures for every employee, your PAYE reference and Accounts Office reference, and your pension scheme details. We reconcile those figures before the first run we file, so the cumulative totals on each payslip pick up exactly where your old provider left off. Done properly, your staff see no change on their payslip and HMRC sees no gap.

The common failure when employers switch is a duplicated or missing FPS, which throws out an employee's tax code and triggers either an overpayment or an unexpected deduction the next month. We avoid that by confirming with you which provider files the FPS for the changeover month, so it is filed once and only once.

Mid-year is often the right time to move if your current payroll is late, error-prone, or silently costing you penalties. We can run the first cycle alongside your existing setup as a parallel check before fully taking over.

Look for three things: on-time RTI filing as a hard commitment, a named person who actually knows your payroll, and pricing that does not move with your headcount or spring a year-end surcharge. Payroll is unforgiving because the deadlines are automatic and the penalties land without warning, so reliability matters more than features.

Ask any provider how they handle the awkward cases, because that is where in-house payroll and cheap software fall down. Statutory sick and family leave pay, student loan deductions, attachment of earnings orders, payrolling benefits in kind, and the auto-enrolment re-enrolment that comes round every three years are all routine for us and all easy to get wrong. From April 2026 most benefits in kind move to mandatory payrolling, which changes how company cars and similar perks are reported, so your provider should already be set up for it.

If you employ subcontractors in construction, payroll is not the whole picture. Some workers belong on PAYE and some under the Construction Industry Scheme, and getting the employment status wrong is one of the most expensive mistakes HMRC pursues. We assess status correctly and run both where needed.

Finally, check that payroll talks to your accounts. We post wages, PAYE and pension figures straight into Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent or Sage, so your books and payroll always reconcile rather than drifting apart and creating a year-end clean-up.