Contents

What’s changing? 1
Reason for the Change 1
Customers Affected 1
Release Notes 1
Payroll Discrepancies 1
Viewing discrepancies 2

What’s changing?

Currently the BACS employee payment files sent by Fourth on your behalf, are submitted to BACS 2 working days prior to Employee contractual pay date.  It is the intention that this will change so that the BACS file will be submitted at the point of Payroll Approval by yourselves which could be submissions 3 or 4 working days before Employee Pay date.  The BACS processing date will not be effected by this and monies will still only appear in Employee Bank accounts on the actual pay date.  To ensure that appropriate checks are made prior to submission we are introducing a new level of discrepancy checks to ensure that all required Banking details are correct before submissions.  The following release note gives details of these checks and what actions need to be completed by yourselves should there be any discrepancies.  Where the system identifies any discrepancies the option to approve the payroll and submit the BACS payment file will be disabled until all detailed problems have been rectified.

Proposed Release Date: 10th November 2016

Reason for the Change

The new process is being implemented to reduce the risk of payments being delayed due to files erroring on the submission day because of incorrect data in the employee record. In order for the BACs files to be sent successfully, all the information in the files needs to be correct. By validating the data early and submitting the BACS files as soon as the payroll is approved reduces the risk of delay and enables early submission of the files. There will be NO change to any payment dates as a result of the early submission it just means the files have been sent and received by BACS awaiting payment date.

Customers Affected

All customers are affected as the system will display any discrepancies on processed completed payrolls. The main purpose of the changes are to apply an early validation on the data used for the creation of BACS files.  Additional benefit is that customers using Fourth BACS submissions will be able to submit the files early.

Release Notes

Payroll Discrepancies

New system validation will now check on completion of Payroll that there is no unexpected or incorrect data and will display any employees that will affect the sending of BACS files by Fourth. Customers who currently submit their own BACS files using the bespoke Fourth extract files built in to the system will also benefit from this enhanced functionality.  All affected employees will be provided in a list on a new screen hyperlink. Employees can be viewed on screen and if required exported to an excel document. All issues will need to be rectified before the payroll approval functionality will be visible and enabled. It will not be possible to approve a payroll that has BACS paid employees with errors that will affect BACS transmission files. The approval is the process that schedules the BACS transmission.

On completion of payroll, the system will check the following and alert employees to be rectified -

• Employee’s net pay calculated on closure matches the BACS net figure or cheque net value.
• Employee’s paid by BACS but with missing Bank Account Details.
• Employee’s with Invalid Bank Account Details.
• Pay Basis (or Company set up) with no Employer Bank Account Details.
• Pay Basis (or Company set up) with Invalid Employer Bank Account Details


Should any of the above checks arise on payroll completion, the system will display the message shown in Error! Reference source not found.
This will result in a number of changes:

• A new hyperlink that can be found within the past pay run screen. Fig 2
• The Net figure to be displayed in red  
• The request approval link will be unavailable within the Past Pay run screen.
• The approval button will be unavailable within the Past Pay run screen.

Below is the path to the past pay run screen.

Payroll>Pay Runs>Past Pay Run List>Navigate to the appropriate payroll

Viewing discrepancies

From the Past Pay run, select the View Discrepancies link on the closed unapproved payroll. 
A List of discrepancies will be displayed on selecting the hyperlink. This can be exported to Excel if required.

Each discrepancy will need to be corrected before the Approval option will be available on the completed payroll. The payroll approval action will schedule the submission of Fourth BACS files that are transmitted by the Bureau.

Before making any corrections the payroll records will need to be rolled back in the first instance. For customers that are managed by the Fourth payroll bureau services please contact the bureau immediately on the best course of action. For In-House payroll specialists you will need to review the issues and apply any roll backs to rectify these through your own internal process.

Once all discrepancies have been resolved and corrected, and the pay run completed, the corrected pay run will be available to be approved. On approval the Fourth BACS transmission files will be submitted. On Successful submission an automated email will be sent to the appropriate payroll approver(s) to confirm this. For In House customers you should continue to process your BACS submission files as now.

Please note that there may be an additional email sent to the Fourth BACS customer’s payroll approver(s) in the unlikely event that the file has been delayed. A similar communication will be issued to the Fourth Bureau team to investigate. On receipt of this email please contact Fourth bureau immediately for an update on best course of action.