What’s New?

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As you can imagine there have been a fair few changes since IRIS Software acquired Staffology back in late 2020 to provide its customers with a next-generation, cloud payroll software solution. Thank you for your patience as we restructured some things to get this blog up and running again. The team has grown 1000% and will be expanding further still. Those of us in the product team will be blogging more regularly from now on to keep you up to date.  

Share Your Ideas

You now have a way of letting us in the product team know your ideas for enhancements to Staffology directly, with the launch today of the Staffology Ideas Portal. 

Please pay a visit, create new ideas and vote on ideas others have raised. We will give you feedback and let you know how they are incorporated into our roadmap. 

What’s New in Staffology?

We release changes to Staffology almost every day, be it making minor performance tweaks, helping you with issues or adding new benefits. Below you will find a summary of what has changed since last time we posted. 

PAYE Legislation 21/22

• Student Loan Plan 4 became available over year end for those who studied in Scotland 
• Student Loan & Postgraduate Loan thresholds were increased 
• Car benefit amounts and charges were updated 
• England & NI, Scottish and Welsh Tax Code bands were changed 
• National Insurance rates & limits were increased 
• Statutory payment rates were increased 
• P60 template was updated 
• Auto-enrolment pension thresholds were updated in line with The Pension Regulator’s instructions 
• Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates were updated 
• The furlough scheme configuration was extended to September 2021, in line with government guidelines 

Off Payroll Workers 

• Employees in receipt of Statutory Payments or Student or Postgraduate Loans can no longer be flagged as Off Payroll Workers, in line with legislation 
• A warning is received if an employee is later identified as an Off Payroll Worker when they are already enrolled in an auto-enrolment pension scheme 
• Off Payroll workers cannot receive Statutory Payments or Student or Postgraduate Loans and are exempt from auto-enrolment 

Umbrella Payroll 

• One click set up of payroll codes for DPSB etc. was introduced to make it easier to create an Umbrella payroll configuration 

Construction Industry Scheme 

• Reverse Charge VAT was included on invoices as part of the legislative changes in 21/22 

BACS 

• The Lloyds Bank BACS Multiple Standard CSV format was added to the available formats for BACS download 
• The Lloyds Bank BACS v1.1 CSV format was added to the available formats for BACS download 

Miscellaneous Usability Enhancements 

• A number of overrides to calculated values were made available when running a payroll, to allow you to manually make changes if necessary, including Student Loans, Postgraduate Loans, Tax, NI, Attachment of Earnings orders, Pension contributions 
• Employee bank details are now checked for invalid characters or correct number of integers 
• The ability to enter year to date figures for statutory payment recovery and compensation values, CIS suffered and apprenticeship levy, to ensure EPS submissions are correct when bringing a company on board mid-year 
• Holiday pay accrual now only includes the pay elements you wish, which allows you to be more flexible with your holiday pay configuration 
• The majority of changes to employee records are now included in an open pay run to allow you to update pay and use it on the fly 
• The ability to bulk send P60s to employees via email any time after year end was added to allow you to finalise the tax year and make checks prior to releasing the documents 
• To Date balances for KIT and SPLIT days were added to help you maintain these elements of statutory pay when transferring from another solution.  
• We introduced the use of Gainsight cookies that will enable us to gather data, if you choose to allow it, that will help us understand how you use the user interface and help make decisions in the design of future enhancements 

Performance Improvements 

We have made several enhancements to the Staffology backend to improve security, reduce processing time and speed up deployments. We now have multiple testing environments and an automated pipeline to reduce time between a change being worked on and it being released into production. We have also worked on improving delivery of emails and payroll processing times for larger volumes. 

What’s Next? 

Due to our continuous release schedule, there are further enhancements planned on a weekly basis; more news coming soon. 

Dylan Martinez, June 21st, 2021

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