P60s and P45s

Two documents are owed to employees by law:

• P60 - given to everyone still employed on 5 April, summarising their pay and deductions for the tax year.
• P45 - given when an employment ends.

Both are under Reports, in the People group. Each can be read on screen, downloaded as a PDF, or emailed.

Who can see them

You can always see your own. Seeing anyone else's needs the Tax, Accounting & Users level, so an employee can save their own P60 without an admin doing it for them.

The P60

Choose the tax year and the employee.

Three figures head the sheet. The third - pay in previous employment - drops out entirely rather than showing £0.00 when there is none, because a zero would assert the employee earned nothing elsewhere.

The tax caption names only the deductions that actually exist; a £0.00 student loan is not a deduction.

A strip above the sheet tracks who has been given theirs, who is outstanding, and where a send failed.

Previous employment figures

If someone joined you part-way through a tax year, their pay and tax from an earlier job belong on the P60, and they matter for the tax calculation too: without them, a mid-year starter is taxed as though the tax year began when they joined, which over-taxes anyone who had already used part of their personal allowance.

Enter them from the employee's payroll record, from the P45 they handed you. The figures are recorded against a specific tax year, so a later year never overwrites them and an issued P60 does not change afterwards.

The tax figure can be negative - a P45 can report a refund position.

The P45

Choose the employee who has left.

The wait for a P45 is counted from the final pay run, not the leaving date. The figures do not exist until that run is posted, commonly a fortnight later.

Part 1 is never something to send. It rides the RTI submission for the run containing the leaving date, so it is already with HMRC. Parts 1A, 2 and 3 go to the employee.

Boxes 7 and 8 are drawn differently - dashed where a blank is deliberate, solid where a figure is simply missing - because rendered identically, a deliberate blank and a missing figure look the same, and that difference tells the next employer how to operate the tax code. Neither box can be filled in by hand.

Related

• Benefits in kind, the P11D and the P11D(b)
• Payslips
• Salary report