Payroll year end checklist: Six steps to make sure you’re ready?

Payroll year end is around the corner. Ideally, it should be just a standard month-12 or week-52 payroll with some extra steps added in to close the year.

But it’s important to know what you need to get right. In this article, we help you get prepped and ready for payroll year end.

Payroll year end things to do

The key thing to remember is that your final reports to HMRC for the 2021/22 tax year must be submitted by no later than 19 April 2022.

Next, you need to prepare for the new tax year and make sure you provide your employees with their P60s by no later than 31 May 2022.

To help you with payroll year end, here’s everything you need to do, complete with key dates for your diary, so you can tick off what’s required and stay on top of your payroll.

Julie Northover supplies expert advice throughout. One of the UK’s foremost payroll consultants and trainers, Julie is a payroll specialist at the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP), and also runs her own payroll bureau for small and elite clients.

Step 1: Check when your payroll ends

In some circumstances, your payroll might not end on week 52, and instead you may need to complete an additional payroll. This will mean your payroll ends on week 53, or possibly week 54 or 56.

This happens if two things are true:

1. You process payrolls weekly, two-weekly, or four-weekly (monthly payrolls are excluded).
2. Your usual payroll date falls on 5 April in any year (or 4 April if it’s a leap year—2024, 2028, and so on).

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Notably, payrolls that run monthly always only ever have 12 months. That means there’s never a month 13, and you can skip this section and run payroll as usual. And if your payroll is run after 5 April then, again, you can skip ahead.

“In April 2022, the 5 April falls on a Tuesday,” says Julie. “Because it’s rare for any weekly, fortnightly or four-weekly payroll to pay out on a Tuesday, it’s unlikely there will be a week 53 for most payrolls this time.

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