Mid-year update

We are pleased to share the release notes for Ciphr Payroll (Accord). 

This release delivers important compliance updates for the 2026/27 tax year, a range of usability and stability improvements to improve the stability and reliability of your payroll processing.

Contents

• Compliance updates
• New features and enhancements
• Quality improvements
• User interface improvements

Compliance updates

The following changes have been made to ensure Ciphr Payroll remains fully compliant with HMRC requirements and current legislation for the 2026/27 tax year.

Bank Account validation (VocaLink)

• The VocaLink modulus checking datafile has been updated to incorporate the latest validation files. This ensures that bank account details entered in payroll are validated against the most current rules, helping to reduce payment errors and failed BACS submissions.

National Insurance data validation

• Historical NI data validation warnings have been reviewed and updated. These updates ensure that NI records are validated correctly and that any warnings generated accurately reflect current HMRC guidance.

Northern Ireland Statutory Changes (SPBPNIRE)

• RTI FPS submissions for archived years have been updated to correctly include SPBPNIRE data where applicable.
• Saving of SPBPNIRE figures has been enabled within the Fast P60 report, in preparation for the March 2027 reporting requirement.
• Validation has been implemented for Northern Ireland employee workplace postcodes within payroll calculations, ensuring only valid NI postcodes are accepted for NIRE-eligible employees.

New features and enhancements

Pay Element creation tool

A new "Add Wage Types from Template" tool has been introduced to simplify the creation of pay elements. This tool allows payroll administrators to select and apply wage type templates, including templates from previous tax years, significantly reducing the manual effort required when setting up new pay elements or migrating configurations.

Task Batch Manager Improvements

• Error messages now show specific failure reasons rather than generic messages, making it faster to diagnose and resolve issues.
• You can now export Task Batch results directly to Excel with a single click.
• Batches can be renamed, giving you better organisation across multiple batch workflows.
• The folder selection dialog has been updated to a modern file picker, improving usability.

Title, Gender and Marital Status validation

Validation behaviour for employee title, gender, and marital status fields has been updated to be more flexible:

• Validations for these fields have been converted from hard blocking errors to non-blocking prompts, allowing payroll processing to continue where data is incomplete or non-standard, while still alerting administrators to potential issues.
• Gender and title validations can now be configured on a per-employee basis, with preferences retained between sessions, giving you greater control over how individual employee records are managed.
   

Quality improvements

The following issues have been investigated and resolved in this release:

• State Pension age warning: The messaging displayed when an employee approaches State Pension age has been improved for clarity.
• CIS Return Injector Preview: An issue affecting the CIS Return Injector Preview has been resolved.
• Crystal Reports – report loading: A previously issued hotfix for a subset of Crystal Reports failing to load has been incorporated into the main codebase, ensuring the fix is consistently applied.
• Crystal Reports – error messaging: Errors encountered during Crystal Report generation are now surfaced with improved messaging to aid diagnosis.
• Calculation cancellation crash: A crash that occurred when cancelling a payroll calculation using the ESC key has been fixed.
• SSO stability: New database columns (SsoUniqueId and SsoUserId) have been added to improve the stability of Single Sign-On for payroll users.
   

User interface improvements

A thorough review of on-screen text has been completed across the application, with corrections applied in the following areas:

• Login and Authentication screens
• RTI and Submissions screens
• Core Payroll dialogs
• Employee and Tax Management screens

Support

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

Where there is a ticket number against an item, you can reference this with any queries if it is an area you have been affected by.