Outsourced payroll for accountancy practices: a guide

• Payroll has fixed deadlines, low fees and no tolerance for error. That is why practices hate it and why it outsources well.
• The work is starters and leavers, RTI submissions, pension assessment, year-end forms and statutory payments, every period, without fail.
• Hand over the running. Keep the authorisation of each run and all client advice.
• A Production seat absorbs payroll alongside bookkeeping; you do not need a separate payroll provider.
• At £4-10 a payslip, the margin only works if the hours per payslip are tight.

Why practices hate payroll

Ask any small practice which service they would drop tomorrow if they could, and payroll comes up first. It is not hard work. It is relentless work.

The deadlines are fixed. Employees get paid on a date, RTI goes to HMRC on or before that date, and pension contributions go to the provider on a schedule. None of it moves because your bookkeeper is off sick or because it is the last week of January.

The fees are low. What we see in the market is £4-10 a payslip, and that is our estimate from running a practice. A client with six staff on monthly payroll is worth maybe £30-60 a month. It is very hard to make that pay if a qualified person is doing it.

And there is zero tolerance for error. Nobody notices a correct payroll. Everyone notices when the cleaner's pay is £40 short, and the phone call goes to your client, and then to you. An error on a set of accounts gets corrected in the next set. An error on payroll is a person's rent.

Put those three together and you have a service that is stressful, unprofitable and impossible to give up because the client expects it. Which is exactly why it is the first thing many practices move to an outsourced team.

What the work actually is

Be precise about this before you hand it over, because the handover checklist comes straight from it.

• Starters and leavers. New starter details captured, starter declaration processed, tax code applied. Leavers processed with final pay and a P45 issued.
• The run itself. Hours or salary changes collected from the client, gross to net calculated by the software, payslips produced.
• RTI submissions. A Full Payment Submission each time employees are paid. An Employer Payment Summary where needed, for example to report statutory payment recoveries or a period with no payments. The software handles the mechanics; the discipline is that it goes every time, on time.
• Pension assessment and submissions. Assessing each worker for auto-enrolment every pay period, enrolling where required, producing the contribution file and uploading it to the pension provider. Re-enrolment when it is due.
• Statutory payments. Sick pay, maternity, paternity, adoption and the rest. We are not going to quote rates or eligibility rules here; they change and they belong on gov.uk. The work is identifying that a statutory payment applies, collecting the evidence, and making sure the software calculates and reports it.
• Year-end. Final submission for the tax year, P60s to every employee, and the tidy-up of anything that did not reconcile.
• Reporting to the client. A payroll summary, the amount due to HMRC and by when, the pension amount and the net pay list for the bank.
• Employer payment tracking. Confirming what the client owes HMRC each period so they can pay it. Not paying it for them, which is another matter entirely.

Software

The outsourced team works in your payroll software, under its own logins. That is not negotiable. The common platforms all support it.

• BrightPay (and BrightPay Connect for the client-facing portal).
• Moneysoft Payroll Manager, still widespread in small practices.
• Sage Payroll.
• Xero Payroll, where the client already lives in Xero.
• Staffology, which a growing number of practices use as a bureau platform.

Whatever you use, the principle is the same as for bookkeeping: named users, role-based access, multi-factor authentication, and the data stays in your tenancy. Our security guide covers the rest.

The handover checklist

Do this once, properly, and payroll becomes boring. Skip it and the first month is chaos.

1. Client list with pay frequency. Weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly, monthly, and the pay date for each.
2. Per-client data sheet. PAYE reference, accounts office reference, pension provider and scheme details, staging or re-enrolment dates, who at the client sends the hours and who approves the run.
3. Employee records current. Before handover, check every employee's details match what HMRC has. Handover is the moment to clean up.
4. Software access. Named user per team member, payroll role only, MFA on. HMRC agent credentials stay with the practice; the software submits using the practice's agent setup.
5. Cut-off rules per client. When hours must arrive by, and what happens if they do not. Write it down and share it with the client.
6. Authorisation route. Who in the practice approves each run before payslips go out. Name a person and a deputy.
7. Templates. The payroll summary, the client email, the query format. Your branding, your tone, sent in your name.
8. Parallel run. First period, the outsourced team runs it and your existing person checks it line by line. Second period, swap. Third period, hand over fully.

The calendar

Payroll runs on a cycle that never stops, so map it like one.

• Every period: hours and changes collected by the cut-off, run prepared, authorised by the practice, payslips and reports sent, FPS submitted, pension file uploaded.
• Monthly: EPS where needed, employer liability confirmed to each client, a quick reconciliation of what the software says is due against what the client has paid.
• Periodically: pension re-enrolment checks, tax code notices applied as they arrive from HMRC.
• Tax year-end: final submissions, P60s, and the new-year setup. Check the current dates on gov.uk; we are not stating them here.

With the team one to two hours ahead of UK time, monthly payrolls can be prepared and waiting for authorisation before your office opens on pay-day-minus-one. That turns payroll from a scramble into a sign-off.

How a Production seat absorbs it

You do not need a separate payroll provider. Payroll is processing work with fixed deadlines, and that is exactly what a Production seat is for. A bookkeeper in our Pretoria office runs the bank recs on Monday, the VAT prep midweek, and the monthly payrolls in the last week, because that is when they fall. The same person, in your software, every month.

The hours are predictable. A clean monthly payroll for a small client might take twenty to forty minutes from collecting the hours to sending the reports, in our experience; weekly payrolls with variable hours take longer over a month. Thirty monthly clients might be fifteen to twenty-five hours of seat time a month. Run your own numbers through the capacity calculator. The point is that payroll fits inside a part-time seat for most small practices and leaves room for the bookkeeping.

What stays with the practice

• Authorising the run. Someone in your practice approves every payroll before payslips go out. Always. The outsourced team prepares and flags; you authorise. Every Muckin job is reviewed in the UK before it reaches you, and then you make the call. See how it works.
• Client advice. Whether to put a director on salary or dividends, how to handle a tricky redundancy, whether an arrangement is employment or self-employment. That is advice, it carries your professional responsibility, and it does not leave the practice.
• The HMRC agent relationship. Your agent credentials, your authorisation with the client, your name on the submission.
• Difficult conversations. The client who sends hours late every month needs to hear it from you.

The margin maths

Be honest with the numbers. Offshore per-payslip rates on the market run about £0.55-0.70 a payslip plus RTI, which is our read of what providers publish. Against a client fee of £4-10 a payslip that looks like a wide margin, and for pure processing it is.

But per-payslip pricing buys you a payslip. It does not buy you someone who knows that Client A always sends hours late, that Client B has a director on an annual scheme, or that Client C's pension provider rejects the file if a postcode has a trailing space. The hours that eat payroll margin are not the run; they are the chasing, the fixing and the client questions. A dedicated person absorbs those inside their hours. A per-payslip provider charges for them or, more often, sends them back to you.

Compare three ways of running 500 payslips a month:

The seat costs more than per-payslip on the headline. It costs less once you count the hours that come back to your desk. Full pricing is on the site; all figures ex VAT, rolling monthly, one month's notice.

Where to start

List your payroll clients with frequencies, put the hours into the capacity calculator, and see whether it fits a part-time seat. Then get in touch. We will suggest a parallel-run plan for the first two periods so nothing goes out unchecked. We muck in from the first FPS.

Published 22 August 2026. Tax rules and rates change — check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners, not advice.