Open Payroll - what do users think of it?

Our firm is using Open Payroll to process about 100 clients payrolls each month by using the Payroll Bureau facility which is available to accountants. I don't process these personally so I might not know about all of the downsides but I believe that processing the simplest payrolls can be just three clicks work after selecting the payrolls to run; to process the payroll, import it to Accounts and then to make the RTI submission.

I don't think we would suggest using the system for complex payrolls but for ours, which in the main have 1 or 2 employees only, I understand it works very well in the main. There are a few small niggles about the set up screens, such as the PAYE code and month 1 indicator not being together.

One of the problems we have is that our clients don't currently have access to the Overview information within Open Payroll, only to their own payslips. This is because we have given our clients restricted access to Payroll so that they can't accidentally change the data. Unfortunately the restriction to their user permissions has cut off this very useful summary screen.

The amounts of their net pay and the HMRC liability do come through into Accounting as supplier bills so they can see how much the payments need to be each month but we would like to get them that extra screen.

There are separate P&L nominal accounts for net pay/PAYE/employees NIC/employers NIC so you won't see a gross pay total.

You can only have one net pay nominal choice for the import in to Accounting, so where there are both directors and employees, you either have to edit the supplier bills or do journals to get a separate P&L charge for each.

SMP calculations work within Payroll but we find we have to make amendments to the figures imported into Accounting afterwards.