Planning Payroll For Christmas Holidays

The run-up to Christmas can vastly increase your payroll admin, with the year’s largest number of annual leave requests to process and three of the year’s eight bank holidays falling with only three weekdays in between them.

It’s important to make sure you get it right and that you process your payroll on time before the Christmas holidays begin, or you risk leaving staff short of cash at one of the most expensive times of year, or having to ask them to repay you money they have been paid in error.

Wagemate can help you to get it right first time, with our fully managed payroll service that acts as your outsourced Payroll Department not only at Christmas, but throughout the year to help with bank holidays, summer holiday leave calculations and so on.

 

How Wagemate help with Christmas payroll

We can help with many of the extra payroll admin issues you face in the run-up to Christmas, as part of our year-round fully managed payroll service.

This includes:

  • Payslip processing.
  • Sending BACS payments.
  • Dealing with employee queries through employers.
  • Auto-enrolment pension issues.
  • HMRC RTI filing including year-end.

Our outsourced payroll management service also deals with queries from HMRC and the Pension Regulator, compiling custom reports as needed, and filing documents including P45, P60 and P11 as required by HMRC.

 

How do Christmas bank holidays affect payroll?

There are three bank holidays in the main Christmas holiday period: Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Day one week later. Between them are three weekdays and one weekend, assuming Christmas falls on a weekday as it does in 2018.

It’s important to make sure you process these correctly – whether you close your entire company, ask people to work, offer a bonus (e.g. ‘time and a half’) for working them, or offer time off in lieu.

You should also make sure you process annual leave correctly as well, especially if you close for the ‘working days’ between Christmas and New Year’s, and require your employees to take them as annual leave.

There are many different ways to handle the holiday period but some careful planning in the run-up to Christmas can help both you and your employees to know where you stand, and especially to know how much people will be paid.

Find out more about how Wagemate’s fully managed payroll service can get you up and running with your own outsourced Payroll Department in time for Christmas, which will relieve your admin burden for the year to come as well.

Just email info@wagemate.com with any questions, call us on 03330 102 102 to speak to our team, or fill in our online form to request a free quote.