Please follow this guide if you need to transfer employees between companies. This may be when companies are acquired or when new PAYE references are needed.
1 or 2 companies #
Decide which of the two options applies:
| Use the same payroll® company for both the old and new company | Use two different payroll® companies by copying the old company to a new company |
|---|---|
| This is the easiest option when all of the employees are the same in both companies, and the old company will not be needed after the move | Use this option when the employees differ, you are splitting a company, or you need/prefer to keep the old company after the move |
In the example procedure below, [some] employees from the old company will be made leavers and moved to the new company as starters.
Dates: If you have salaried employees, choose start and end dates that align with your pay period to avoid a salary starter/leaver pro-rata effect, e.g., 31st March/1st April is typical.
Practice! #
We recommend you practice this procedure beforehand so you are familiar with every step. The easiest way to do this is to copy a company with no employees, which will create a Test company. You can then practice the various downloads and bulk employee edits with this Test company, confident that you will not accidentally modify a real company or real employees. You can do a pay run redo, but don’t approve any pay runs from this Test company. Keeping the name as Test company will allow you to delete the company at the end when you have finished your practice.
Procedure #
Important: If you are uploading employees, be sure to delete all YTD state columns starting with a $ from column BF onwards- Enter an End date for each old company employee to set them as leavers.
- Employees > Download…
- Edit the CSV file to filter end_date for all non-leavers and enter the leaving date, and save as Excel XLSX
- Use bulk employee edit to modify start and end dates
- Only if the old PAYE scheme needs to be closed, enter a Scheme ceased date in Setup > Report Definitions > GB RTI FPS. However, HMRC does not allow a future cease date, so you may have to wait until the actual day of your last payday.
- If the scheme is not being ceased, you can skip this step.
- If you are using 2 companies, you can defer this step to the end. Note that you will not be able to use this scheme after you’ve closed it!
- Redo and approve the required pay run to submit the leavers from the old company
- Download and save the PAYE previous pay/tax and AE pension status
- Tools > All Tools > Company switch PAYE AE Pay Item workbook
- Select the old company
- Enter the leaving date
- Click Create template and Download to generate a workbook which includes PAYE and AE Automatic Enrolment pay items indexed by the current usernames, works_Id and name in 2 sheets
- Be sure to save this Excel workbook for a later step
- Optionally Copy the old company to a new company only if you need 2 companies (otherwise, skip this step)
- Tools > All Tools > Company create or copy
- Select the existing old company to copy
- Select the employees carefully, considering how to minimise edits – it is very easy to upload employees, but much harder to delete them!
- Select None if you are splitting one company into several other companies -it will be quicker to download/ upload the employees and Pay Items afterwards into each company
- Select Include leavers in the last 31 days, but not current employees, to only select the subset of leavers
- Fake employees should be left at zero, and frequency can be any value
- Select the Leaving date of the leavers – only those employees are copied
- Click Create company
- This will copy all company information, including Pay/Report Definitions, Employees, and Pay Items, to a new Test Company
- New employees will be created with unique usernames, e.g. john.smith@acme.com -> john.smith@acme.com1
- Report and Data feed usernames and passwords are preserved – these are likely to need changing
- Tools > All Tools > Company create or copy
- Companies > Update either the existing company if you are using the same company, or the newly created company named Test Company:
- In the Tax tab, enter the new company details
- PAYE Reference, Accounts Office AO Reference
- The company’s last re-enrolment date – this will be the date of the first hire if it is a new company
- For a new Test Company Ienter the Legal name in the Main tab, and the Address in the Postal tab
- Update
- In the Tax tab, enter the new company details
- Clear all End date, and set a Start date for new company employees to set them as re-starters, which will automatically reset all YTD state values and pension information on the first pay run
- Employees > Download…
- Clear any Pay after end dates on employees; otherwise, this will stop the bulk upload
- Use bulk employee edit to make the changes
- Upload Pay Items, AE pension status, and PAYE previous pay/ tax from step 4 above
- If you are using the same company, you can upload the sheets directly using the username in column A. If you’re using 2 companies, you must edit the workbook in Excel and swap the username column (A) with the works_id column to upload by works_id in column A. Alternatively, you can use the name column as long as you do not have two John Smiths. Pay item upload uses the first column index.
- Pay Items: If you do upload employees, you must add all standard pay items to each, either:
- Editor > Add AE > Update/View Payslip automatically adds all the standard items
- Download old Pay Items and Upload
- Tools > Upload Pay Item workbook to upload the 2 sheets into the new company, transferring previous PAYE pay/tax and AE auto-enrolment status.
- If you are performing this procedure in the first tax month of the year, you must set the PAYE previous pay/tax columns to zero!
- Any P6 and P9 tax codes that have been collected in the old company would also be used in the new company – this is especially important as you will not be able to access DPS until after your first submission.
- You may need to amend the AE date to be the start date.
- Pay Items: If you do upload employees, you must add all standard pay items to each, either:
- If you are using the same company, you can upload the sheets directly using the username in column A. If you’re using 2 companies, you must edit the workbook in Excel and swap the username column (A) with the works_id column to upload by works_id in column A. Alternatively, you can use the name column as long as you do not have two John Smiths. Pay item upload uses the first column index.
- Pay run Redo
- Check everything twice!
- Send a scheme cease FPS if required
Self-service #
If you used the single-company move, employees will continue to access their documents using the same username and email.
If you have two companies, then you may wish to swap usernames so that the original usernames are used in the new company and _old usernames in the old company:
| Old company | New company | |
|---|---|---|
| Bulk employee edit usernames | john.smith@acme.com -> john.smith@acme.com_old | john.smith@acme.com1 -> john.smith@acme.com |
| Employees access | old payslips using old usernames, john.smith@acme.com_old | new payslips with current usernames, john.smith@acme.com |
| Email addresses (unchanged) | john.smith@acme.com | john.smith@acme.com |
Email addresses remain unchanged in old and new companies. Please ensure employees are aware of the difference between their username and email, and that any password reset request will allow resetting either or both.