Year-Round Compass

Tax Code uplift

Dayforce Start of Year process will be updated to perform the following Tax Code uplifts with effect from 6 April 2021. These will be updated automatically for the new tax year.

New Starter Checklist

Options A and B will be updated to reflect change to default tax code with effect from 6 April 2021 to 1257L.

• 1257L W1
• 1257L M1
• 1257L X

Tax Bands

These will be updated automatically for the new tax year by the Dayforce central tax engine.

England and Northern Ireland

Here are the rates for England and Northern Ireland for tax year 2021/2022.

Tax calculations for 6 April 2021 onwards include the changes to allowances and Income Tax thresholds that have previously been announced by the UK Government at Spending Review 2020. The remaining rates and thresholds will be calculated using 2020-2021 information for 6 April 2021.
     
Income Tax rates and thresholds are subject to confirmation at the budget 3 March 2021.

Wales

Here are the rates for Wales for tax year 2021/2022.

Scotland

The personal income tax bands and rates have changed for Scotland for tax years 2021/2022. The current levels for tax year 2020/2021 are provided as a comparison.

* Changes were noted from previous year

These will be updated automatically for the new tax year by our central tax engine and will impact both employee and director pay calculations.

Class 1 National Insurance Rates

No changes were observed in 2021 / 2022 from previous year.

Class 2 National Insurance Rates

No changes were observed in 2021 / 2022 from previous year.

The gender pay gap is calculated as the difference between average hourly earnings (excluding overtime) of men and women as a proportion of average hourly earnings (excluding overtime) of men’s earnings. It is a measure across all jobs in the UK, not of the difference in pay between men and women for doing the same job.

Since 2017 regulations have been in place enforcing that organisation's with 250 employees or more should be reviewing and reporting figures annually around gender pay equality.

General information

In May 2019, the Equality & Human Rights commission named and shamed 47 organisations that had failed to submit their gender pay gap reports following the 2019 deadlines. It said it would begin formal investigations into their non-compliance and determine if these organisations were breaking the law by withholding gender pay gap reports. If so, they would be required to publish the data immediately; those which did not comply could be taken to court and issued with a fine.

In August 2018, the parliamentary Business, Energy, and Industry Strategy (BEIS) committee called for gender pay gap reporting to be widened to include all companies with more than 50 employees. To date, the committee’s recommendations have not been implemented and whilst there was growing support, the Coronavirus diverted focus on this issue.

Coronavirus

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and the Government Equalities Office (GEO), suspended deadlines for 2019 / 2020 reporting meaning that there was no enforcement of the employers need to report data although some employers still continued to stay committed to reporting their data, or had already done so by this notification.

Due to this, data for the 2019 round of reporting, which was originally due to e-filed in spring of 2020, is incomplete. At the time of suspension, 26% of expected reporters had already filed their data on the government website; more than 5500 reports, for the2019 / 2020 period by 7 July 2020. The snapshot dates for this period were set as 31 March 2019 (public sector) and 5 April 2019 (private sector).

On 22 February 2021, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) have announced that employers now have until the 5 October 2021 to report their gender pay gap information for the 2020 / 2021 reporting year (which uses a snapshot date of 3 March 2020 and 6 April 2020). No enforcement action will be taken if they report by then.

Coronavirus Impact on 2021

There is no indication that there will be a repeat of the suspension of reporting in 2021 and it is expected that employers will need to report their data for the ‘snapshot’ date of 31 March 2020 (public sector) and 5 April 2020 (private sector).

There is going to be clear impacts felt from Coronavirus. With the implementation of the job retention scheme, first rolled out in the UK, meant that a number of employees where not on full pay on the snapshot date nor had their pay topped up. There were also redundancies made that significantly impacted the reporting pool showing an increase/decrease in gap, creating figures that were unreliable or not a true representative of the company’s gender equality.

A few things to note for this year:

• Check the status of your employees pay at snapshot. Consider if they should be disqualified.
• Check that you still qualify to report after disqualifications. You must have 250 members of reportable employees to file.
• Ensure that you provide an adequate and detailed explanation of your figures and include details of furlough, redundancies made.
• Submit before the 5 October 2021 deadline.

To reiterate, the key date if the snapshot date. If on this date, you met the criteria to produce a report, you should continue to do so again. Check your employees pay on this date, and whether the employee was on full pay. If not, you may consider disqualifying them from the report to ensure the results are fair.

If you are uncertain on what needs to be done, seek advice from the (EHRC) and (GEO) to confirm your filing needs.

What can Dayforce provide you to support?

Dayforce has provided you the tools in pre-configured reports and excel template to provide any of the employer responsibilities that you may have listed below:

• Mean gender pay gap
• Median gender pay gap
• Mean bonus gender pay gap
• Median bonus gender pay gap
• Proportion of males and females receiving bonuses
• Proportion of males and females each pay quartile

A support knowledgebase article is available with guidance on covering this requirement for 2021. Please follow the link here to see details and obtain the required details.

Now available in R59 SP4, when an employee notifies you of their requirement to take statutory leave, such as maternity or adoption, often employers are asked what the employee will be paid during this leave.

It is often the case, that the payroll administrator needs to:

• manually ascertain the qualifying period of the leave,
• manually work out what the employee’s specific average qualifying earnings
• Identify the minimum rate of pay for the employee
• Deduce a potentially complex calculation of occupational pay that could be tiered with different percentages over the period of leave (e.g., to top-up the employee’s pay above the statutory minimum)
• Communicate the requirement to the employee as required

How do you do this?

Within the Leave Management screen in People, you need to generate a PDF file containing the payment schedule for the duration of an employee's maternity or adoption leave.

To generate a leave schedule in the leave management screen, start by selecting a maternity or adoption leave record. Then click the new Generate Payment Schedule button that is in the HR Information section of the record:

Once the file is generated, it is sent to your Message Centre and the Message Centre of the affected employee, where it can be downloaded. It is also added to the Notes slide-out panel within the Overview screen of the employee's profile in People (this is communicated to users in the Message Centre notification).

The file displays a list of statutory and occupational leave payments for each of the employee's regular pay dates between the current date and the end date (or estimated end date) of the leave period and amounts displayed are prior to PAYE or NI contributions.

The Payment Type column of the list displays the allowance code for each payment. At the top of the list, the file displays the leave start date, the Qualifying Week (or Matching Week in the case of adoption) that is used to calculate payments, and the date that the file was generated.

Do I need to set anything up?

Yes, there are a few little things to do to enable this process:

• To access the leave payment schedule file, roles must be assigned access to the new Leave Payment Schedule document type in Documents > Admin > Document Types.
• When you click Generate Payment Schedule, the application runs the new Calculate Payment Schedule background job to generate the payment schedule file.

A few things to note:

• Roles are not assigned access to this document type by default.
• The new Generate Payment Schedule button is automatically displayed for existing maternity and adoption leave records.
• The background job is not available to run manually in System Admin > Background Jobs

When the feature is used:

• We use the HMRC rates for SMP, lower earnings limit threshold etc. at the time of the maternity leave period (where HMRC have not yet published future rates we use the current rates).
• We apply the lower earnings limit to calculate SMP. If there is occupational maternity pay, then we assume that the LEL threshold is not applied to non-SMP components of that scheme.
• We assume that you have checked that the employee is eligible for SMP.
• We assume that maternity pay (whether statutory or occupational) is calculated weekly and pro-rated to the number of days in the month and as such will fluctuate monthly depending on the number of days in the month.

The feature does not:

• Calculate Maternity Allowance as this is not payable by the employer.
• Calculate for Shared Parental Leave adjustments that may occur later.
• Calculate Keeping in Touch days.
• Provide periods of additional leave components where no pay is due.
• Itemize by week.

Student Loan Type 4 Introduction

Student Loan Type 4 is being introduced from 6 April 2021 for Scottish Students. Dayforce has been updated to accommodate this change with this type being added to the Employees Tax Definitions screen drop down. DPS has also been updated in Dayforce to accept Student Loan Type 4 notifications.

Student Loan Rate changes

Please see below updates for student loan threshold changes. These will be updated automatically for the new tax year by the Dayforce central tax engine.

As a reminder these are the plan types in existence and when they are applied:

Plan type 1

• an English or Welsh student who started an undergraduate course anywhere in the UK before 1 September 2012
• a Scottish or Northern Irish student who started an undergraduate or postgraduate course anywhere in the UK on or after 1 September 1998
• an EU student who started an undergraduate course in England or Wales on or after 1 September 1998, but before 1 September 2012
• an EU student who started an undergraduate or postgraduate course in Scotland or Northern Ireland on or after 1 September 1998

Plan type 2

• an English or Welsh student who started an undergraduate course anywhere in the UK on or after 1 September 2012
• an EU student who started an undergraduate course in England or Wales on or after 1 September 2012
• someone who took out an Advanced Learner Loan on or after 1 August 2013

Postgraduate loan

• an English or Welsh student who took out a Postgraduate Master’s Loan on or after 1 August 2016
• an English or Welsh student who took out a Postgraduate Doctoral Loan on or after 1 August 2018
• an EU student who started a postgraduate course on or after 1 August 2016

On the 16 December 2020, our product, account executives, and customer relation teams met with over 40 organisations to open a dialogue with our client base. Your voice matters to us, and this is the perfect opportunity for key business stakeholders and customers to align on the strategic direction of the product together. The council forum will allow internal and external stakeholders to understand the larger set of priorities and under consideration, specific features will be discussed, to give an opportunity and make clear the direction of the feature(s) and the opportunity for users to feedback their opinion and help shape product.

Our last council saw presenter Natasha Reynolds, our Product Manager for UKI, provide product strategy and priorities leading into 2021, and gave insights into how Ceridian intakes into our P&T organisation for roadmap.

Introducing the registration page

To offer an efficient and effective way to register for your place in advance , you can now register directly from this link. Using this new format, we can protect individual privacy, improve attendee data, and enable centralisation of customer feedback to our organisation.

We have also increased the number of sessions we will hold to 8 in 2021.

4 Product sessions will be focused specifically around product initiatives and detail whilst 4 additional sessions shall be covered by our account executives and customer relationship teams to provide business updates and get more insight into your experiences with the Ceridian Business.

The customer forum will meet every quarter and usually will last up to an hour to cover a varied set of topics specifically on feature enhancements. We will partner the forum sessions in the following month, for deeper product council focus discussions, and give you plenty of notice ahead of the council what the topic shall be to ensure you have the right people on the sessions from your team.

Please register to secure your place. This new format shall begin in February 2021 with the following dates:

** Dates are subject to change

Commonly asked questions

We are pleased to announce Dayforce Release 60 will be available from the 15 March 2021 (or later depending on your release cadence).

Attend our webinars. Click on the registration link to save your spot.  

Click here to learn more about what’s in the release for the following product areas:Benefits

• Compensation Management
• Dayforce Tax Engine
• Engagement
• Human Resources
• Learning
• Mobile
• Onboarding
• Payroll
• Performance Management
• Recruiting
• Reporting & Analytics
• Wallet
• Workforce Management

Webinar recordings: Missed a webinar? All webinars are recorded and will be posted to the Support Portal within two days after the original webinar. They can be found under Reference Materials – Release Webinars and Toolkits. Click here. (You must be logged into the Support Portal first)

Please note: All email communications are posted in Product News, available in Ceridian Customer Community. Product News also contains ‘This Just In’ posts which are posted regularly with compliance updates.

The tax year in the United Kingdom runs from 6 April to 5 April. Please get prepared for year end and seek updates from available webinars, support KB articles, and release notes to assist you.

As a reminder, please note that in R59 SP1 we made things a little easier for you. The Year-end Checklist has been revised and you no longer need to configure the “Final Submission This Year” flag in EPS Submissions, within Payroll > Tax Month Management.

Period 12 submissions of the EPS will now be automatically checked as the Final Submission and Dayforce will notify you that the check box is selected as below:

Please note that before you submit your final EPS for this tax year, you will need to verify that all periods have been committed.

Final pay run for a pay group for a tax year is determined by details for the pay group in the Pay Calendars tab in Pay Setup > Pay Group. The UK tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April. When the final pay for a legal entity has been committed, Dayforce updates the Final Pay status indicator in the Status column in Year End > United Kingdom for a legal entity, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

If one or more final pay runs have not been committed, you can go to Payroll and load the pay runs in question to make sure that they are committed. Once final pay has been committed, you can then ensure that the final ESP submission has been sent to HMRC before you proceed to the final step of publishing the P60 and P11D forms to send to employees.

Dayforce Payroll has been updated with the following rate changes for Statutory Payments for UK with effective date of 4 April 2021.

Remember, you can recover 92% if your total Class 1 National Insurance (both employee and employer contributions) is above £45,000 for the previous tax year. 103% if your total Class 1 National Insurance for the previous tax year is £45,000 or lower.

Statutory Sick Pay (SSP)

Dayforce Payroll has been updated with the following rate changes for Statutory Payments for UK with effective date of 6 April 2021.