Anyone on here have a small business and run their own payroll?

[Takver]

If so, do you use 3rd party software, and which one?

To date, I've used HMRCs web based PAYE and NIC calculators, and kept the equivalent of an old paper P11 for each employee on an excel spreadsheet. Now RTI is coming in, that obviously won't serve any more. (Including DH & me, we generally have around 7 people on the books at any one time.)

I've tried the free HMRC software and can't get along with it (and that's putting it politely), so I guess we'll have to cough up, but it'd be good to hear others' recommendations. Cheers!

I use Moneysoft, it's £56/£112 per year (depending on what size you need), is fully set up for RTI, and is simple enough that someone who has never done payroll before (like me) can use it. Fantastic software for the money IME and IMO.

Damn - I've just been reading reviews and looking at the Moneysoft website, and it looks perfect EXCEPT that it doesn't work on Macs . . .

After a bit more reading around on book-keeping forums I'm wondering if I'm actually going to find anything appropriate for a Mac (surely we can't be the only small business that uses one ). I guess I could run one of them as a PC once a month to do the payroll, but its going to be a PITA

The other alternative seems to be Sage One, but I wasn't thrilled with it when I looked at the trial

We use Sage for 17 employees, but we do also use sage line 50 for our accounts so they merge together.
The really good thing about sage is that it does do regular local seminars about changes to wages etc.

Sage One is horrible (although never used it for payroll), it's inflexible and never does what you want it to do. I was incredibly thankful when the client finally got round to trialling some other cloud bookkeeping and decided to switch .

Think the Mac is going to be a problem to be honest, I've had a scout around the web, and there doesn't seem to be anything that's not part of a much more expensive package.

I found Payroo mentioned a couple of times as a cloud based package, but haven't looked at them at all myself.

Many thanks for your experiences. I agree, the mac is definitely an issue. My inclination is to sign up for free trials of both Sage One and Moneysoft, and see whether it is going to be more of a pain to put up with the inflexibiity of sage (we use SagePay, so I'm accustomed to the joys of their interfaces) or the nuisance of having to keep a functional pc emulator programme going long term.

I've had a look at Payroo, but it didn't look particularly user friendly.

Have you checked if your bank offer a service? For instance, Barclays offer on for about £50+vat I think though haven't needed to use it yet