If you are migrating to BrightPay, and have an employee who is currently on maternity leave and receiving an SMP payment, you will need to follow some steps to ensure that this payment continues to be calculated and paid for the duration of the SMP period.

Entering Leave Dates

To enter the Maternity Leave for the employee, go to the Employees menu > Select the Employee from the left hand side and choose the 'Calendar' button at the top of the screen:

Now click on the date within the calendar that the employee started their Maternity Leave on and choose the option 'Maternity Leave' from the right hand side of the screen:

You will now be prompted the relevant leave dates:

You will need to review the details entered and adjust them if necessary.

Entering Average Weekly Earnings

When you have completed the leave dates, navigate to the Average Weekly Earnings Tab:

You will receive the message as above that the employee will not qualify for SMP. This is because BrightPay will not hold the information for the employee for the previous pay periods and cannot calculate the average weekly earnings.

To get around this, we can choose either of the following options:

I want to calculate average weekly earnings by entering payments history manually:

And historical payments can be entered that BrightPay can use to calculate the Average Weekly Earnings. We can click "Add Earnings" to add more payments to use in the calculation, once all payments have been added > Press Save.

OR

I want to manually enter the average weekly earnings amount:

If the payroll software you are migrating from provides this figure, we would recommend this method. The figure can be entered > Press Save.

The dates will now be added to the Employees Calendar, highlighted in green as per below:

Processing SMP Payments

When you return to the payroll menu > Click into the current active period > Click into the Employee in question, you will see that the SMP amount that BrightPay has calculated will have been added to the Payroll:

This payment will continue to be added to the Employees payroll input menu based on BrightPay's calculation automatically until the SMP period has reached it's duration.

If BrightPay's SMP calculation doesn’t match the previous payroll system, or you need to manually edit it. You can also click the Spanner icon beside the SMP payment and choose to override the amount:

This will allow you to enter the SMP amount manually on the Payroll menu for that period in the box provided:

BrightPay uses the full statutory week method when calculating & applying SMP. 

For more information on this, please see the following article.

Recoverable Amounts

The figures that are processed via payroll for SMP will now be added to the HMRC menu as recoverable amounts for each relevant period. An EPS needs to be sent to HMRC each Month/Quarter.

For more information on Recovering Statutory Payments, click here.

If you have already recovered Maternity Payments or any Statutory Payments within the current tax year prior to moving to BrightPay, we would also recommend reviewing the following article:

For more information on Entering Recoverable Amounts to Date after migration, click here.