Category: Accounting

Using payroll services to deal with your financial interests

Charlie

Life as a contractor can be difficult.  Many workers who are employed like this find themselves stuck in a minefield of bureaucracy, without the time to handle the administration of a Limited Company or working on a short contract.  For those in this position, singing up with a contractor umbrella can be the best thing to do, providing peace of mind and complete security.  Similarly, if you want to receive your income in the most hassle-free way possible, it is often worth speaking to a CIS payroll service.  payroll services like these are used by established contractors, sub-contractors, sole traders and partnerships.

If you are a sub-contractor and would like to register on one of these schemes you need to go to the HMRC website.  You will be given a Unique Taxpayer Reference number that will identify you on the revenue and customs system, and will need to send that, as well as your name and National Insurance number, to the company you are keen to register with.  You will be taxed at 20% on this income at source as long as you have a UTR number.  Those without such a number will have tax deducted at 30%.  Contractors working on this basis must typically find their own work and negotiate their own rates.  They will also be required to send off a tax return at the end of the year in order to claim all of the work relate expenses incurred in the course of the year.  You can offset these expenses against the tax paid at source throughout the year.

The Construction Industry Scheme, or CIS, usually applies to contractors and subcontractors who are in mainstream construction work.  The scheme allows a separate company to take on the role of the contractor in terms of administrative tasks associated with the job.  It was set up by HM Revenue and Customs, which explains why those who want to register must first go to the government body.  Some contractors need a contractor umbrella for a few weeks, whereas others will use their services for a number of years.  They tend to offer a lot of flexibility, not necessitating a fixed contract.

Clearly, a contractor umbrella can offer a number of advantages to those working in the construction industry and other relevant areas.  The security of being on a CIS payroll can provide valuable security to those who lack the time or skills to deal with the administrative tasks that come with this kind of work.  Making the most of payroll services can be one of the easiest ways to give yourself peace of mind when it comes to financial matters.

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Recovery audit software is especially critical in difficult economic times

Annie

The bigger a business grows, the more important a role its accounts payable audit department will have. A certain percentage of invoice payments, estimated by Fiscal Technologies to be between 0.5 per cent and 0.1 per cent, are, actually, duplicate payments. Naturally, it is very difficult to tell precisely how much of a loss this means for the company, since each invoice payment is for a determined amount. So, if you are lucky, a duplicate might occur for a small payment, or if you are not so lucky, a much larger payment will be duplicated. But, statistically speaking, it likely that 0.1 per cent of invoice expenditure will be doubled unnecessarily. Recovery audit software is a way of recuperating the losses incurred by these duplications.

How do duplicate payments happen? Well, there is a plethora of ways in which this problem may arise. Commonly it comes from human error that consequently affects either the supplier’s or the in-house data entry system. Generally speaking, an invoice entry will require about twelve different fields to be filled in by a member of a data entry team, such as an invoice number, a quantity of supplies, a supplier number, a date, and a purchase order number.

The cost of recovery can be surprisingly high; independent recovery auditors might charge a huge commission – often in the region of fifty per cent – of the payments that they successfully recover for you. And that, of course, does not account for those that they cannot identify. With recovery audit software your accounts payable team can run audits daily, or weekly, in order to optimise your chances of paying no more than the correct amounts.

A solution to this problem is increasingly urgent in uncertain, and challenging, economic times. Why? It is not only – or mainly – because the pressure grows on your own business to ‘do more with less’, as they say, and to remove waste and leakage from your expenditure. This is, of course, true, though, and the longer an organisation goes without an effective recovery solution, the older duplicate payments become, and the pricier it becomes to recuperate them. The main reason for the urgency is the variety of factors in the economic climate that cannot be controlled. Again, the longer a payment goes unrecovered, the bigger the risk becomes that suppliers relevant to the payments may go out of business. Accounts payable audit teams are advised to make use of recovery audit software to safeguard companies against these specific dangers.

Please click http://www.fiscaltechnologies.com/ for further information about this topic.

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