When must an RTI submission be made?

A Full Payment Submission must reach HMRC on or before the date employees are paid, for every payroll run. Late submissions can attract penalties, and the deadline does not move for illness, holidays or bank holidays. That hard, repeating deadline is why payroll is the function where single-person dependency is least survivable.

What is an Employer Payment Summary and when is it needed?

An EPS is submitted where the employer needs to tell HMRC something the FPS does not cover, such as claiming an offset for statutory payments, claiming the Employment Allowance, or reporting a period with no employees paid. It is submitted alongside or instead of an FPS depending on the circumstance, which is exactly the kind of detail that lives undocumented in an experienced payroller's memory.

How does salary sacrifice change a payroll run?

It reduces gross pay before tax and National Insurance are calculated, which changes the figures reported on the FPS and can affect entitlements based on earnings. The arrangement has to be a valid variation to the employment contract, and it must be reflected consistently every run. Undocumented sacrifice arrangements are one of the most common sources of error when a payroll changes hands.

Can payroll be outsourced without clients noticing?

Yes, where the work is done inside the practice's own payroll software under the practice's credentials and all client communication continues to come from the practice. Payslips, submissions and correspondence carry the practice's branding throughout. The arrangement is a delivery change, not a client-facing one.

What should be documented before payroll cover is added?

Each client's pay dates, pay elements, salary sacrifice and benefit arrangements, pension scheme and assessment basis, director arrangements, and any recurring adjustment that is not obvious from the last run. Then a checklist for the run itself. Adding a second person before that documentation exists transfers the risk rather than removing it.

Accounting firms · 🇬🇧 United KingdomScenario

Removing the single point of failure in a payroll bureau

A payroll bureau that depends on one person fails on the day that person is unavailable, because RTI requires a Full Payment Submission on or before every payday and the knowledge needed to run each client sits in one head. This is an illustrative example of how Salt approaches payroll capacity, using a UK practice running around 140 payrolls as the profile.

Ask how we'd handle this

Scenario — an illustrative example of how Salt approaches this problem. Not a description of a specific client engagement.

The business shape it describes: UK accountancy practice, 9 staff, around 140 payroll clients.

Scenario covers: White-label payroll processing and RTI submission cover
Jurisdiction: United Kingdom
Sector: Accounting firms

The setup

Take a UK accountancy practice of nine staff running around 140 client payrolls, all processed by one member of staff.
When that person is ill, RTI submissions are at risk on every payday that week. The practice knows this and has not been able to hire cover economically.

What usually turns out to be wrong

No documented process. The knowledge exists only in one person's head, which is also why nobody else can be trained quickly enough to help during an absence.
Client-specific arrangements undocumented, including salary sacrifice, varied pay dates, directors on annual payrolls and irregular pay elements.
No checklist for the RTI submission itself, which is the step with a hard deadline on or before every payday.
Auto-enrolment assessment and pension file submission treated as part of the same undocumented run, so a payroll error propagates into a pension error.

How this would be worked

Document each client's payroll specifics into a standard record, starting with the clients whose arrangements are least standard.
Build a run checklist covering the payroll itself, the RTI Full Payment Submission, auto-enrolment assessment and the pension file.
Add a trained second pair of hands working inside the practice's own payroll software, under the practice's own credentials.
Introduce a pre-submission review step covering the RTI file specifically, separate from checking the payroll figures.
Define the coverage arrangement in advance, including who runs which client and on what notice, rather than improvising during the absence.

Why we'd be the right fit

Taking over a payroll function that exists only in one person's head means reconstructing each client's arrangements before running them, inside the practice's own software, under the practice's name, without the clients noticing a change.
Work with a hard deadline on every payday leaves no room to learn the quirks on the job.

What the business would be able to do

The practice would be able to run payroll when any one person is unavailable, because the process is written down and more than one person has run it.
Each client's arrangements would exist as a record rather than as recall, which also makes onboarding the next hire a matter of days rather than a season.
The RTI submission would have its own review step, so a payroll error and a submission error are caught separately.

What we'd flag

Documenting a payroll function almost always surfaces clients whose arrangements have been handled inconsistently for years. Those have to be corrected as they are found, which adds work to a project that was sold as continuity cover.

Answers

Removing the single point of failure in a payroll bureau

Where this applies

PayrollService White-Label AccountingService All services in United KingdomFRS 102 / UK GAAP More scenarios42 illustrative, labelled examples

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