Anyone had experience with SAGE payroll

[Thisisme2024]

Hi, I work as an administrator and am responsible for collating and inputting our payroll onto monthly spreadsheets which we send to an accountant who produces the payslips. I check the payslips and once approved, our finance team pay the employees. I'm happy with this task as I have good attention to detail and feel as though I do it well (no payroll issues since I've picked up the task which wasn't the case with my predecessor). However my company are talking about getting SAGE and me inputting the employee info onto there and we no longer use/need the accountants. I'm feeling very uncomfortable about this as I have no tax, NI, statutory pay experience (and to be honest no desire to learn about it). One minute our FD says it won't make any difference to my job as instead of inputting into an Excel spreadsheet, I'd just be inputting into SAGE. Then in the next breath he's saying how I will become a tax expert (again, not what I aspire to be!). I have no knowledge of P32s, tax periods, tax codes, etc and am getting quite stressed about this change. Does anyone have experience of using SAGE payroll and if so, how much payroll knowledge do you actually need to be able to run your company payroll from SAGE? Many thanks!

It’s not the software that’s the issue it’s that you have zero experience of running payroll - how to deal with sick pay, maternity pay, dealing with a starter or leaver, statutory requirements regarding reporting and pensions

They would be daft to do this

Thank you PickledPurplePickle - this is what I am worried about :(

I think you would need training to run payroll regardless of the software - would this training be made available to you?
And would someone experienced in payroll be supervising/overseeing your payroll and checking it?

I'd have no problem with an administrator inputting the initial data (after some training and with ongoing guidance as required) but I'd have someone who actually knew how payroll worked checking it over before it gets finalised/paid to staff/filed with HMRC.

Hi VivX, I've been told that I can do a SAGE online course for a day. The FD just keeps saying all I need is to input the info into SAGE (as I currently do into an Excel spreadsheet) and SAGE 'will do all the work'. I feel as if I'm being railroaded into something I don't think I have the skillset for. I've not been told that anyone will check/support what I do. He keeps calling me the "new Payroll Manager". To be perfectly honest it's making me want to resign....

If you don't feel up to it, then you'll need to say so. The FD is trying to flatter you into by calling you "payroll manager"

You're not going to become a payroll expert after a one day course. It's unreasonable to expect you to become sufficiently capable to be a payroll manager if this is all the training and support on offer to you.

Ask the FD if they (or anyone else in the finance team) know how to run payroll, who will answer any queries you might have, what if you make a mistake due to inexperience/lack of training and also, what would happen when you go on holiday.

They would be bonkers to let a novice loose on payroll without appropriate training, support and cover.

(In theory, you could blindly put in the numbers into Sage payroll, follow the steps and it would spew out the payroll. But it is not particularly intuitive if you don't know how payroll works, if you make a mistake or if something non-standard comes along.)

The software choice is kind of ancillary to the general issue of being expected to do a job with inadequate training and support - especially one where there can be fines/penalties/interest for making mistakes or missing a deadline, not to mention the impact on any employee if their pay goes wrong.

My company uses Sage payroll.

We had an issue whereby our Payroll person went off sick, the company we contracted at short notice weren't able to process it in time, and there was nobody to do the payroll for circa 500 staff the following week.

Through a combination of training from an external consultant, new payroll administrator and me (who'd never even seen Sage payroll previously), we got it done. I've worked in Finance for over 20 years, been FD for the last 10 years, and know a lot about payroll, and there were lots of quirks I had to learn.

Do NOT allow yourself to be put in this position. It's too risky, and your FD has no idea about payroll matters if they are trying to push this on an office admin person. I would resign over it too.

How many staff in your business and how high is your staff turnover? What version of Sage would you he using?
For a small company it might not be too bad. It is partially correct that thr system does a lot of work for you such as calculating tax, pensions and statutory pay, and it sounds as though you have the accuracy and attention to detail part nailed. Obviously everythibg the system calculates depends on you inputting accurate info for the system to be able to make these calculations.
Is it mainly just salaries on the payslps or do you have expenses, benefits in kind, salary sacrifice etc which all add complexities.
Sage have an excellent support helpdesk and online training. However I'd strongly advise you to:
Get a very experienced person (external consiltant if necessary) involved in helping you set up the company on the system and the pay and deduction categories. Also inputting ytd figures and journals to accounts systems if applicable. If the basics are incorrect then you're stuffed.
Insist that overall responsibility for the payroll lies with the Financial Director who must thoroughly check the payroll anf sign it off every month before it is finalised.
If the Director is referring to you as Payroll Mnaager then ask for a promotion to manager level (if that's what you wsnt) and ask for a proportionate pay increase. Remember they will be saving a lot of money by not using the external accountants.

I work in finance and have often done payroll.

The online payroll systems have
a lot of the legal stuff built into them so it is possible for someone without a lot of payroll knowledge to get it right if they have good attention to detail. One days training will get you using the system correctly.

All that will happen at the accountants office is that they will be uploading your spreadsheet and then pressing a button to create the payslips, tax documents etc.

For example, you don’t need to know anything about tax - you just tell the system the person’s tax code and it will do the tax correctly on the payslip.

The problem with running payroll like this in an organisation with no internal expertise is what do you do when you come across a problem or an unusual situation. How do you double check if someone reports they’ve been paid wrong. In your organisation this will hopefully sit with the director.

So, I think that you should be fine.

It can go badly wrong Sage payroll.

I've done payroll for years on and off, when I first started doing it, it was all manual, book A and book B.

Here's what happened, completed month 12 and started the year end run (before MTD), completed the checks, ran the P60S and the final upload just wouldn't go. Contacted Sage technical team who talked me through it and it still wouldn't go. They accessed the computer I was working on and forced it through.

The program had rolled the previous tax month's all into month 12, effectively almost doubling each employee's earnings. Phoned HMRC (which anyone who has ever phoned them knows is a long and tedious process). HMRC said later they had never received a call.

Came to run month 1 and the software just would not work, at this point I was beyond frustrated and contacted our accountant to take over our payroll. Sage were indignant it wasn't their software that was broken and continued to charge the monthly fee.

It took years to sort out successfully with HMRC. As for Sage I have had many marketing phone calls (l did freelance accountancy for small businesses) told them I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole and told colleagues not to use it.

Don't let your employer force this flakey software on to you.

Thank you to everyone who has responded, I really appreciate you taking the time to do so. Some of the terminology in your responses (which are a foreign language to me) have cemented my decision to tell my manager (who isn’t the FD) that I do not want the responsibility of ‘payroll manager’. I am very much a worrier and the idea of potential fines/penalties is already making me anxious. Thanks again everyone!

OP ignore any advice which tells you this will all be fine, with no exposure to payroll it would put you in an unfair and difficult position.

The system is as good as the information you put in. For example you would to remember to tell the Sage system to:

• apply new tax codes from the HMRC inbox
• apply employee sick days with correct dates
• apply maternity/paternity/shared parental leave
• change salaries when amended
• add and remove bonuses as required
• apply pensions (possibly under salary sacrifice)
• apply other salary sacrifice benefits
• not sure if any shift work or hourly paid staff are involved, however if so, that brings an additional layer of complexity
• process starters
• process leavers and send p45
• if you ever have to pull anyone at the last minute you'd need to understand the effect of making such a change to the system
• submit P32 returns to HMRC each month
• run p11d by 6 July and submit to HMRC

If you don't get some/one of the above right, it could result in:

• employees being under/overpaid (you would need to know how to make gross or net corrections through the system)
• HMRC receiving incorrect information and therefore applying wrong tax codes to employees

Your FD is trying to push you into this as a money saving exercise, but seriously they probably need to consider how many consultants they are using instead, as they'd probably make more savings by cutting a few £500 a day people than they would by getting you to do payroll, given the risk of it going wrong.

Where I work they use an outside payroll company not because there's no one to type the numbers into a software programme but because that's not what doing a payroll is really about. You need to know what you're doing in terms of legislation, it would be risky for the business and totally unfair to expect you to be able to do that

I'm sorry but your FD sounds like a complete twat. I've been doing payroll and al other FM jobs for over 20 years and what he is saying is just utter bullshit.

Sorry, my post last night was a bit blunt. I was a bit cross at your FD and their lack of respect generally, as I jumped into bed quickly, but that's not your fault, so apologies for that.

But I only wrote a very short post, only because you'd had many very very good nice and long messages before explaining it all clearly.

I too have installed payroll for companies, mainly sage, but xero aswell, and have seen some corkers (big mistakes) in my time from people who didn't know what they were doing.

I too, like thiscomputer have had long fights with HMRC and Sage, so take warning.

Please Think carefully before being pushed into something you might later regret op.