Stop me tearing my hair out - payroll for 6 hour ‘nanny’

[fruitfly3]

I’m ‘employing’ a local student to provide some after school support for me - £13 p/h for 3-10 hours per week (variable). I’m having to employ as it meets the HMRC criteria to do so and I want the arrangement covered by my home insurance. I’ve applied to register myself as an employer with HMRC. I now need payroll. I really don’t want to pay a lot for this but need it to be simple (this whole arrangement is really stressing me out - this was supposed to help me not cause me a tonne of admin). Sage is £20 per month, KashFlow has terrible reviews and HMRCs free solution isn’t web-based. Any thoughts?

I'd go for Sage in your position. The support is good if you have any problems with it. I have a friend who used it for her small family business 0-5 employees and she finds it fine. I've also had experience using their other softwares.

There isn't a cheap way to do it if you can't use HMRC free software. The only way around it is if they average 7 hours ish or less per week and therefore the pay falls under £417 a month. You still need to produce payslips yourself, but you don't have to report it to HMRC.

Don't forget, you'll need employers liability insurance too.

Why can’t you download the free HMRC software?

Just go with nanny paye (or one if the othee similar places) . It is around £300 a year but they sort all the hmrc bit out and help with contracts and holiday pay and redundancy pay etc.

@FusionChefGeoff i don’t have a stable laptop at the moment (changing jobs) and I also do most of my admin on my phone which the HMRC won’t work for. I think I’ll go with Sage and suck the cost up. Nanny tax is more expensive and I don’t need all the bells and whistles - this is an informal, zero hours arrangement with a student. Thanks all.

Brightpay I think is under £100 a year for micro employers (up to 3 employees I think).