Your February 2017 To Do List

Author: Ian Hurst — Managing Director, Paymaster People Solutions

With January almost behind us, you will no doubt be well into the momentum of the New Year. In order to keep this positive momentum going, here are some essential To Do-list items to help you make your February another great payroll month.

• Reconcile your Emp201 submissions by making sure that the amounts submitted match the amounts on the Emp201 report. It’s always a good idea to make sure that what was submitted has also been paid over to SARS. Do this for the September 2016 to January 2017 period. Handy tip: remember that March 2016 to August 2016 should already have been submitted. Lastly, be sure to check for discrepancies and flag any differences which may require further troubleshooting and investigation.
• Login to the SARS e@syFile^TM portal in order to check that there are no messages (or pending IT88 certificates) waiting to be processed.
• Verify that all your employees have not increased their retirement annuity (R/A) contributions. Thereafter, confirm whether some employees are expecting additional tax relief deductions to be processed through the payroll department. If so, process these promptly.
• February is a good time to ask all employees to update their personal information on the payroll — for example: they need to update their addresses, their marital status and the number of children/dependents that they are responsible for. In the event that your organisation subscribes to employee self-service options, then employee-information updates happen seamlessly (and easily too). If however you are still on manual processes, simply print all employee personal information reports and get your line-manager/s to distribute these for completion (and prompt return for capturing). Handy tip: employee information fields need to be accurate, particularly for when you prepare employees’ tax-certificate runs a little later in the year.
• Check to make sure that all employees are correctly assigned to their corresponding department and reporting to the right person within the organisation. This is critically important because many of our clients require spending budgets to be approved. And, as you may well know, budget projections for employee/staff-related costs, needs to be accurately calculated. Therefore, in order to avoid the frustration of inaccurate spending budgets, why not consider allowing Paymaster People Solutions to provide you with super-accurate payroll-related budget projections and reports.

Happy February! from myself, Ian Hurst (CEO of Paymaster People Solutions), and the rest of the super-amazing Paymaster People Solutions team.

Paymaster People Solutions (Pty) Ltd is a subsidiary of Grant Thornton Advisory Services Cape (Pty) Ltd
Grant Thornton Advisory Services Cape (Pty) Ltd is a member firm of Grant Thornton International Ltd

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