To switch to a new tax year or to access a previous tax year in BrightPay Cloud, click on the tax year dropdown in the top left of your screen and select the desired year.

BrightPay Cloud will then move into this tax year and let you review the details within this employer file.

You can switch tax years from any page you are currently on in BrightPay, ie on the organisation page, browse employers page or within the employer itself.

Important: Once you move to a new year, make sure to bookmark it. This will simplify things each time you log in.

FAQs

Q. How do I access a report for 2022/23 or earlier? 

A. BrightPay Cloud version has only been available since the tax year 2023/24. If you processed payroll before this time, it would have been using the desktop version of BrightPay.

To access your older payroll records and run reports, you’ll need to find the BrightPay Desktop icon on your PC and open your company file there. If the payroll was processed on a different computer, you may need to use that specific PC or check if you have a backup of your payroll data.

Note: Only tax years that were imported into Cloud or processed on Cloud will be available online. If you ran any previous tax years' payroll on BrightPay desktop, you will need to access the desktop version to view this data.

If your BrightPay Cloud dashboard opens to the wrong tax year (e.g., 2025/26), it’s usually because your browser is remembering the previous year’s URL.

To resolve this:

• Clear your browser cache and cookies so BrightPay loads the default landing page for your account.
• Alternatively, once you select the 2026/27 tax year, bookmark that page. In the future, use the bookmark to go directly to the correct year’s dashboard.

This should help ensure you land on the preferred tax year when you log in.