BrightPay facilitates the importing of employee information in FPS format from Freshpay.

If you are migrating to BrightPay Cloud, both employees and their mid-year pay information (if applicable) can be imported from Freshpay into BrightPay Cloud using this import option.

Importing into BrightPay

Please log in to BrightPay with your Bright ID. If you have already purchased BrightPay or another Bright product, or used BrightPay Connect, you will already have a Bright ID.

If you do not have a Bright ID, please click Sign Up for a Bright ID and follow the steps.

As a new user, when you log into BrightPay, the Welcome to BrightPay screen will provide a step-by-step guide on how to set up your information.

Step 1 – You will need to set up an Organisation. For assistance on setting up your organisation, please see here.

Step 2 – Click Create or Import an employer. For assistance on setting up your employer, please see our step-by-step guide.

Step 3 – Open the employer in order to import your employee and pay information into BrightPay.

Exporting and preparing your FPS file from Freshpay

1. To export an FPS file from Freshpay, access your FPS submission.

   Copy the full FPS content to Notepad, then delete the first two lines of text from the file. Save the file as "FPS.xml" to a location of your choice.

2. To import the file, go to the Employees tab > Import & Export > Import/Update Employees from FPS File

3. Browse to the location of your FPS file, select it, and press Open

Important note: make sure that the FPS with the most recent modified date is chosen, to ensure that the most up-to-date employee information (and year to date amounts, if applicable) is imported.

4. Employee information contained within the FPS selected will now be displayed on screen.

   Review your employee information to ensure that the correct FPS has been selected. Should you not wish to import an employee, simply untick their name.

5. When ready, press Import.

Employees and their mid-year totals to date (if applicable) will now be imported into BrightPay.

Important notes

This import option will only bring across employee information that is required by HMRC in Full Payment Submission.

Further manual entry may thus be required in each employee record for employee information that is not included on an FPS, for example:

• Email addresses
• Bank details
• Annual leave entitlement
• Departmental allocation
• In-year previous employment taxable pay and tax details

Additional information

Following the import, you should:

• Review starter declarations and previous employment figures – These will need to be re-selected and re-added after import
• Confirm there are no leavers – No leavers from previous pay periods will be imported
• Verify student loan, postgraduate loan and director details – These should be reviewed for accuracy and completeness
• Enter missing employee information manually – Where required, employee details can be manually updated within the Employees section

Further employee information can be manually entered within Employees if required. Alternatively, you may wish to update missing employee information from a CSV file; for more details, click here.

The Migration Checklist Cloud 2025-26 may assist you with the migration process and setup.

It is also recommended that all employee details are reviewed before processing any payroll to ensure information imported is correct and applicable for the tax year in question.

After reviewing your employee and employer information, simply click the Payroll tab to commence processing payroll.