Child Care

Use this wizard to create statutory childcare payments — statutory maternity pay (SMP), ordinary statutory paternity pay (OSPP), additional statutory paternity pay (ASPP), or statutory adoption pay (SAP). The system payroll codes described (SMP, SPP, ASPP, and SAP) are automatically provided as part of each implementation. The Child Care  tab in the Module Definitions window defines the criteria for each of the childcare payment types.

This wizard has six pages.

Employee ID

The field defaults to the employee ID for the currently selected record. You can change the entry by clicking and selecting a different employee record.

Maternity, Paternity, Additional Paternity, Adoption

If the selected employee is a female, you can select Maternity, Paternity, Additional Paternity or Adoption. If the employee is male, Maternity is not available.

Date of Confinement

Type the date on which the baby is due.

For maternity pay, Date of Confinement is required to calculate the eligibility of the employee to receive childcare benefit. This is not required for SPP and SAP. At this point, the employment record is checked to ensure that an employment start date has been entered.

AWE

The estimated Average Weekly Earnings (AWE) can be calculated by the system. However, you can enter the amount manually if the system has been recently implemented or the employee is a new starter. The AWE must not be less than the lower earnings limit for NICs for the employee to receive maternity pay, as defined in the payroll parameters. If the AWE is less than the value, a message is displayed that asks whether you want to continue.

Use Start Date

If you want to use a date, rather than a start year/period, to identify the start of the SMP pay period, select this check box. The date defaults to the date of confinement. If you want to set a different start date, type the date (in the format dd/mm/yyyy).

Start Year / Period

This field is available only if you clear the Use Start Date check box.

You can enter the Start Year and Period details to determine the first period when the childcare payment is to be paid. The system defaults to the current tax period. The information you enter aids the profiling of the payments.

Period Weekly Payment Profile

Based on the information you enter on the previous page, a proposed payment profile is displayed, but you can change it.

The details of the fixed payments/deductions on the employee’s HR record are updated with details about the weeks of SMP payment. This information is automatically passed to the working file when the SMP is due for payment.

NOTE: When SMP payments span two tax years, and statutory values (such as weekly rates) change in the new tax year, you must ensure the fixed payments for the periods in the new tax year for the employee are correct. This is because the software uses the statutory values for the current tax year and the values for the new tax year are not available in the system.

Most employers can recover a percentage of the childcare payments — for example, 92% of SMP.

If your organisation is classed as a small employer, you can claim back 100% plus a percentage of the total gross SMP as compensation for the national insurance contributions paid on the childcare payments. These criteria are maintained against supplementary payroll codes used in certain automated reports and functions to calculate the recovery values.

Three system payroll codes are provided in addition to the main childcare payments codes: SMPR, SPPR and SAPR. The details, primarily the percentage that can be recovered for each payments type, should be defined against these codes.