2025-1 Ciphr Payroll Release Notes (Accord)

MVP compliance release for 2025/26

Tax Year Compliance

We have created and updated all the system files to enable you to roll into the new tax year for 2025/26.

As part of this we have implemented all the required rates and bandings as published by the relevant government departments, including PAYE, National Insurance Contributions, Student loans and updating the statutory payment rates etc.

The NIC changes include not only the increase in employer contributions from April 2025, but also involves the changes to the Secondary threshold (now below the LEL for the first time), the changes to the employment allowance and the new validation requirements for NI Category letters B, E, I and T.

To support these changes, we have also completed robust testing ensuring that our results match those of HMRCs supplied test data as well as using wider scenarios.

P60 Compliance

We have updated the P60 templates to reflect the 2024/25 tax year and have also added a new Foreign Country field.

Introducing Neonatal statutory pay

The Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act 2023 is due to come into effect from April 2025. To facilitate this additional statutory payment, we have:

• Implemented new data fields in the RTI Journal, including updates to the database and user interface
• Included new data in the FPS Creation – FPS XML and database (PARTIFPS)
• Updated the RTI Submissions
• Implemented the calculation for Neonatal
• Updated Payroll Update process to push new data fields into RTI Journal
• Updated EPS creation, including updates to the database and user interface 
• Added additional period accumulators to support new statutory payment
• Introduced new Neonatal Pay Wage Type
• Added the new additional period accumulators to the report designer
• Updated Reset Accumulators and Period Accumulators dialogs and introduced an additional check to see if Accumulator 15 is in use and needs to be reconfigured

• Updated export Employee Details dialog with Neonatal fields
  
  

Workplace Postcode Compliance

As part of HMRC’s compliance standards they have introduced a new requirement to report workplace postcodes for those employers using Investment or Freeport zone NIC categories.

To facilitate these requirements, we have:

• Implemented a new field in the RTI Journal, including updates to the database and user interface
• Included a new field in the FPS Creation – FPS XML and database (PARTIFPS)
• Updated Employee Enter/Adjust – Database, user interface, and validation
• Updated Payroll Update process to push new data into the RTI Journal
• Included a new field validation in calculation
• Included a new field to the Employee Table
• Included a new field in the import
• Added a new field in PAPerAccum during Payroll Update
• Included a new employee field in the Copy/Move Employee functionality
• Introduced validation against the relevant NI letters

Pension Drawdown Compliance

To ensure that all the requirements of the pension drawdown changes are covered, we have:

• Fixed an historic bug in the Pension Drawdown Serious Ill Health Lump Sum FPS XML related to payment frequency reporting
• Implemented new payment types in the RTI Journal, including updates to the database and user interface
• Included new fields in the FPS Creation – FPS XML and database (PARTIFPS)
• Introduced support for Pension Commencement Excess Lump Sum and Standalone Lump Sum in calculation
• Updated Payroll Update process to push new data into RTI Journal
• Introduced support for importing Pension Commencement Excess Lump Sum and Standalone Lump Sum
• Introduced support for exporting Pension Commencement Excess Lump Sum and Standalone Lump Sum

Development Framework

As notified in the 24.1 Release we have now disabled Microsoft Access support.

Users will no longer be able to run payroll on an Access database and will see the message below if they attempt to:

Quality improvements

Along with all the required compliance changes we continue to work on providing quality improvements to our product.

As part of this work, we have improved various warning/error messages to include additional information such as the LAN file names when the system is unable to read files.

We have fixed the missing Foreign Country field on the payslip export routine and introduced a post-restore script in the database restore process.

A warning has been added for the RTI file validation for tax years prior to 2024/25 and we have now added version information to the login journey so that it is easier for you to identify which version you are using.

You will see this in the screen below:

Further Information

For more details on general functionality please refer to the related help guides.

We are committed to continuing with our compliance and quality improvements and these release notes will continue to be revised on a regular basis. Please keep checking back for the latest updates.