Payroll year end: a checklist for West Midlands SMEs
Payroll year end punishes small teams hardest. In a large business there's a Payroll Manager with a plan; in an SME it often lands on one person who also has the weekly run to get out. The work itself is well defined — the risk is all in timing and workload.
Before the final pay run of the tax year: process every leaver and starter, confirm final figures for the year, and make your last Full Payment Submission on or before payday, marking it as the final submission of the year.
After the year closes: give every employee their P60 by the statutory deadline, update employee tax codes for the new year, and check the new year's thresholds and rates are applied in your software before the first run.
Where it goes wrong is rarely knowledge — it's capacity. If your payroll function is one person, year end plus business-as-usual is genuinely two jobs for about six weeks. That's precisely the kind of gap a temporary Payroll Clerk covers well, and with same-day response on temporary briefs it's a call worth making before the crunch rather than during it.