FreeAgent Update - Release Mozzarella

Working out Simple Payroll

We hold our hands up: if you want to run your own payroll for you as a Director or for your employees, and your situation is remotely complex, you'll need the services of an accountant or payroll service.

For most it's pretty simple, though, and we've now added better support for calculating payslips when you have other employment income or start part-way through the year. You set the other income details on the Self Assessment Income Tax Return for that year. We also allow you to calculate 'Employee' as well as 'Director' National Insurance Contributions. The differences are explained here (276kB PDF file).

At the moment you'll still need an accountant to create your end-of-year reports. But we're working on that.

Incidentally, even if someone else generates your payroll, you can add those payslips into the system to help you track salary payments and repayment of PAYE/NI to the government. Just generate a notional payroll for the year and edit each one to reflect the numbers you've been given.

Printing FreeAgent Web Pages

Some tidying up to our 'print stylesheet' - when you print the browser window you should get a nice-looking page without any extraneous menus. For an even better result, you can turn of the headers and footers using the Page Setup options on your browser.

Specifically, we've fixed the VAT Return page so that you can actually see the numbers when you print it out. Always handy.

Uploading from Safari

Mac browser Safari, although fantastic in many ways, has always given us problems with the way it handles uploading. We've made some changes so our Safari users should more reliably be able to upload logos and bank statements.

Reclaiming VAT on Expenses prior to registration

You can reclaim VAT on goods you purchased up to 3 years prior to registration, and services up to 6 months prior. This includes expenses which you incurred before you even started trading (see the HMRC guidance here).

For simplicity, we include all expenses in this three year period in your first VAT Return, since we don't really know whether its goods or services you bought. To be squeaky-clean, you should zero the vat amount on services which are older than 6 months.

Misc Bugfixes

We squashed these little critters:

• Flat Rate Scheme surplus incorrectly adding unreclaimed VAT on purchases.
• Corporation Tax calculations not handling part-year accounting periods