First time with nanny

[Meandmini3]

Our baby’s nursery is closing down and we might need to employ a nanny. Is there an idiots guide to this? I run a business as joint director so I know a bit about PAYE etc but nothing about employing a nanny. Any help is appreciated!

There is not anything to my knowledge. I have thought about writing something but never got very far with starting that.

If you search my username you will find some posts from the past about the costs of employing a nanny. The figures will be a bit different now but the same principles apply.

Generally speaking these are:
You are the employer of the nanny, you set the hours of work, the days, you set the pay rate, you can tell them what to do and when to do it - though try not to micro manage.

You therefore need to run PAYE as an individual employer, the nanny does not work for your business. You need to provide a workplace pension scheme.

You provide a contract of employment, with at least statutory paid holiday entitlement. You can decide how holiday is allocated - one way is to say all bank holidays are to be taken off as annual leave, then split the remaining amount 50/50 between your choice and nanny's choice. You can decide all of it but this does not generally go down well with nannies.

You can outsource this to a nanny payroll provider, such as NannyPaye, PayeForNannies, TaxNanny etc.

It's like employing anyone else, you pay employers national insurance, have to stop tax paye and have to offer them a pension. It's easy to register as an employer with hmrc and use their free basic tools to calculate the tax and ni, I suggest using Nest for the pension

@nannynick you should def write up something. Earn lots of money for your years of Wisdom and knowledge

@Meandmini3 most people use a company to work out wage

Where are you going to look for a nanny

Agency or private search

Can you employ her through an umbrella company?

You can use a nanny payroll company to deal with it all for you. They will give you contract templates and send out the payslip each month for you. I used Paye for nannies

As the above poster says, a nanny pay roll company will give you the idiots guide. Ours (nannypaye) wrote a contract, send out pay slips, calculate pension, NI, do p60s etc. They were really helpful when I first rang with where to set our wage, what is reasonable to have in the contract and covid support. They act as your HR so you can call them with any issues.

We pay wages monthly, obviously and then have a yearly tax bill which goes to nannypaye. They tell us how much we owe.

A new nanny is about to start with us and we used a nanny agency to help write the job advert and vet candidates. They were also really helpful in terms of what to ask/look for.

The company 'nanny matters' have a brilliant PDF on employing a nanny, it covers
1- Introduction
2- Employed vs Self employed
3- Payroll obligations
4 - Other statutory obligations
5 - Part-timers
6 - Agreeing a Gross or Net pay
7 - Paying the NMW & Living Wage
8 - Tax NI and Pension costs

Well you get the gist - I'm sure if you email them they would send it to you. They have lots of information on their website too.

There are 15 chapters in the booklet so full of information!

@Meandmini3 be really clear with you nanny (as in have a conversation with them before they start rather than just rely on them having read the contract) about how holiday, sickness (theirs and your child's) and other things work and what you expect them to do other than keep the children alive... do you expect to come home to the kitchen tidy which might mean dishes on the side if the dishwasher is on or everything immaculate with the hoover having been run around? Do you expect your nanny to host play dates? Do you expect her to cook from scratch or assemble meals? If DC are school age, do you expect her to do reading with them etc
It is like having any other employee in terms of each of your rights & responsibilities but it's like any employee who comes from a different organisation and thinks that what they did there was standard whereas you think that what you expect is standard and there are no other staff (at least not in our house!) to give them a helpful nudge in the right direction so every conversation is with your manager.