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If I sign up with SimplePay after the start of the tax year, can I still use it for my Bi-Annual Filing?

You can use SimplePay for your filing even if you used another system for the first period(s) of the tax year, or even for the whole tax year. You have two options here: using take-on balances or recreating payslips.

Using Take-on Balances for Filing Purposes

We strongly advise you to use take-on balances when capturing information for filing purposes. This removes the possibility of any discrepancies between your previous system’s payslips and those on SimplePay. In order to capture take-on balances, your first payroll period must be after the first March pay period and the employee’s appointment date must be before this. More information on these aspects can be found in the following section:

If you have been using another payroll system for the whole tax year but now want to use SimplePay for filing purposes, you will need at least one finalised payslip for that tax year.

  • For example, if you used another system for the 2017 tax year, you should follow these steps:
    • Set your first payroll period end date to the end of February 2017, as described in the Pay Frequencies section of the article linked to above.
    • Enter take-on balances for the full tax year – including information from March 2016 to February 2017 – as described in the Take-On Balances section of the article linked to above.
    • Finalise the February 2017 payslip as a zero payslip.

Using this method will allow SimplePay to generate IRP5s and the e@syFile export file for you. However, the EMP501 on SimplePay requires actual payslips, so you will need to use your previous records for this information for any months prior to your first payroll period on SimplePay. You are able to download an Excel version of the EMP501 to use as a template for this.

Recreating Historic Payslips

However, if you would like, you are welcome to recreate all of your historic payslips from March onwards. You will need to ensure that your first payroll period is set to March as described in the Pay Frequencies section of the article linked to above.

This method will allow SimplePay to generate the IRP5s, e@syFile export and EMP501 for the entire tax year.

Please note: using this method opens up the possibility for discrepancies in the calculations between your previous payslips and those you create on SimplePay. This may be the case if you previously used the periodic tax basis (i.e. using the tax tables) or if certain things were overridden / configured in a non-standard way on your previous system. Again, for this reason, we would strongly recommend you use the take-on balances option.

Filing Documents

SimplePay generates your Bi-Annual filing documents from the data captured on the system. You can access these documents by going to Filing > Bi-Annual Filing (IRP5s etc.). More information is available in the following related articles: