How contractor umbrella services can handle your admin needs

Working as a contractor can be difficult at times.  Some contractors who work on this basis find that the busy schedule of a contractor leaves little time to handle the administrative tasks that come with it.  If this sounds like you, working with a contractor umbrella may be the best option for you, giving you security and the peace of mind of knowing that your payments are in order.  In addition, you may want to consider a CIS payroll service, which enables you to receive your payments in the easiest way possible.  Payroll services like these are ideal because they are specifically designed for established contractors, sub-contractors, sole traders and partnerships.

What is usually referred to as CIS stands simply for the Construction Industry Scheme.  It generally applies to contractors and subcontractors employed in mainstream construction work.  Essentially what happens is, under the scheme a separate company takes on the role of the contractor by fulfilling all the administrative tasks associated with the job.  HM Revenue and Customs are behind the scheme, and those who wish to sign up must first visit the HM Revenue and Customs website in order to be given a Unique Taxpayer Reference Number, without which you cannot participate in the scheme. There is no long term commitment involved in signing up; while some users need a contractor umbrella for a few weeks, others will use their services for a number of years.

Once you have your Unique Taxpayer Reference number, you will be identifiable on the revenue and customs system.  The next steps are to give the number, as well as your name and National Insurance number, to the company you want to register with.  The tax rate on those with a UTR is 20%, but 30% for those without it.  Finding work and negotiating rates is still up to the individual contractor, as is the end-of-year expenses list.  By filling in a list at the end of the year of all the expenses incurred throughout the year, you can offset these against your tax rate.

Those working in the construction industry may wish to join a contractor umbrella for a number of reasons.  For many, the simple time-saving element of being on the CIS payroll makes it worth signing up. If you don’t have to go through paperwork to make sure you get paid, you might be able to fit in a trip to the park with the children, or another pint at the pub.  Payroll services are there for you to make the most of – it’s up to you to go ahead and do it.

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Duplicate payments are a threat to the profits of big businesses

The larger a business grows, the more significant a role its accounts payable audit department will have. A certain percentage of invoice payments, estimated by Fiscal Technologies to be between 0.5 per cent and 0.1 per cent, are, in fact, duplicate payments. Of course, it is very difficult to say exactly how much of a loss this constitutes for the company, since each invoice payment is for a certain amount. So, if you are lucky, a duplicate might occur for a small payment, or if you are not so lucky, a much larger payment will be duplicated. But, statistically speaking, it likely that 0.1 per cent of invoice expenditure will be copied unnecessarily. Recovery audit software is a way of recuperating the losses incurred by these duplications.

How do duplicate payments occur? Well, there is a multitude of ways in which this problem may arise. Commonly it stems from human error that consequently affects either the supplier’s or the in-house data entry system. Generally speaking, an invoice entry will require around twelve different fields to be filled in by a member of a data entry team, such as an invoice number, a quantity of supplies, a supplier number, a date, and a purchase order number.

The cost of recovery can be surprisingly high; independent recovery auditors may charge a huge commission – often in the region of fifty per cent – of the payments that they successfully recover for you. And that, of course, does not account for those that they fail to identify. With recovery audit software your accounts payable team can run audits daily, or weekly, in order to maximise your chances of paying no more than the right amounts.

A solution to this problem is increasingly urgent in uncertain, and challenging, economic times. Why? It is not only – or primarily – because the pressure increases on your own business to ‘do more with less’, as they say, and to cut waste and leakage from your expenditure. This is, of course, true, though, and the longer an organisation goes without an effective recovery solution, the older duplicate payments become, and the costlier it becomes to recover them. The main reason for the urgency is the range of factors in the economic climate that cannot be controlled. Again, the longer a payment goes unrecovered, the greater the risk becomes that suppliers relevant to the payments may go out of business. accounts payable audit teams are advised to make use of recovery audit software to safeguard companies against these specific dangers.

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