The Impact of PAYE Modernisation

What impact will PAYE Modernisation have on small businesses and accountants?

With the “big bang” of PayMod hitting on the 1st January 2019, we will see a change in how our payroll is reported to the revenue.

We will soon be moving away from the traditional practice the Irish payroll world is used to, generating files from your payroll for self-review, then submitting to ROS once you are happy, we will now be following in our UK neighbors footsteps to comply with Real-Time Submissions.

Payroll operators will no longer have the option to review their payroll, amend if needed, regenerate and upload your P30 files when everything is in order. The safety net we know and sometimes can rely on too much will soon be gone.

Currently we also have the P35 yearend balancing submission. With this additional recovery option available to us, we can account for any discrepancies at year end to ensure our cumulative liabilities for the tax year are reported accurately.

With PayMod, you will report your liabilities via your payroll directly to the Revenue, after processing a payroll period whether it is weekly or monthly.

At present, we have a considerably longer timeframe (monthly or quarterly based on your businesses ROS setup) to review, reprocess, make corrections and regenerate our revenue files.

So what does this mean for small businesses and accountants?

For small businesses who think there may be knowledge gaps in their handling of payroll, there will be two potential routes to take.

• Upskill/train your payroll operator(s) if their knowledge is not current or they have never taken a payroll course.
• Outsource your payroll to an accountant.

For accountants, there may be room to grow your payroll services. Using the coming months, accountants will be considering the following:

• Use Pay Mod to your advantage and try to win business in this market.
• Ensure you have the resources to provide a payroll service to a larger client base if the work comes your way.
• If you are a practice that wants to limit your liability, consider moving away from providing payroll services and handling payroll back to your clients ahead of January 1st to give them time to adjust to taking payroll back in-house.

Here at Surf, we are anticipating our customers’ needs. We are thinking ahead of the potential decisions/obstacles our customers will face and internally we are brainstorming for solutions to make the transition easier.

In the coming months, along with the payroll release we will also be providing a training course covering Payroll Fundamentals. This will cover manual payroll processing and combined with our user-friendly software and first class support, will ensure that any of our clients will have the tools and knowledge needed to effectively run a payroll.