I need to start paying a nanny.

Does anyone have any advice on whether it’s worth getting a company to do the PAYE (for £115/year) or if it’s easy enough to do myself? I find filling in a tax return online simple enough so don’t think I’ll have a problem, but I don’t know how much work will be involved in submitting data to HMRC.

Why do you need to do the PAYE? All of ours have been self-employed so sort out their own tax. The only other reason I can think is you run your own company and want a nanny on the payroll, but then your own accountant would be able to sort that out.

Bear in mind that you’ll have to comply with the new-ish RTI regs. For a tenner a month, I’d let someone else have the hassle.

The hassle of dealing with PAYE / HMRC isn’t beyond the wit of most intelligent people, but there’s more than that to be wary of if you’ve never employed someone before – from minimum wage, to maternity entitlements if they get pregnant, redundancy liabilities after a couple of years service, Health & Safety duty of care, etc. etc. I deal with this kind of thing at work, but I’d much rather go through some sort of agency than employ someone myself for personal stuff.

Self-employed I would have thought – how long are you taking him/her on for?
That said, we had one I put her on the payroll as I was already employing two other people.
Be careful – I agrred to have one “for three to four months until the twins start sleeping through” (according to my wife)….. turned out to be three years 🙁

@irelanst / @sharkbait – it’s not been allowed for many years to treat an employee as self-employed – http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/employment-status/

@IHN – The RTI thing looks OK – I can apparently use the HMRC Basic PAYE Tools to submit the pay online monthly.

@edlong – I can’t afford to get someone from an agency – that’s a load of extra costs – so will have to deal with minimum wage (I wish!), mat leave etc anyway.

Thanks for all advice so far. Anyone got any experience either of doing it DIY or using a payroll company?

Can’t you get the nanny to use an umbrella company?

EDIT: Can someone put a picture of that famous Nanny with an umbrella as I’m a technical fool?

We did it ourselves for the first year or two, and its a bit of paperwork and not that tough, but we eventually hired nannytax to handle it all and they were very good. It was about a tenner a month (that was three years ago) and well worth it, especially when our nanny got pregnant, which made things a bit more complex.

http://www.nannytax.co.uk/

especially when our nanny got pregnant, which made things a bit more complex.

I bet it did 😉

@irelanst / @sharkbait – it’s not been allowed for many years to treat an employee as self-employed – http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/employment-status/

Things may have changed, it’s been over 3 years since we lived in the UK and even then the HMRC were starting to get a little touchy about self-employed statuses in general. But all ours were self-employed, with ‘certification’ from HMRC. Thinking about it a little more, ours was a fairly specific situation with the nanny working different days and times each week to suite us, so not regular hours or full-time and no expectation of exclusivity.

Thanks @thebrowndog – that sways it for me – I’ll get someone to do it for me. nannytax now want £276/year but a friend is using taxnanny who want £115 and I plan to use them.

We used these guys:

Home

Happy with the service they provided (just sorting out the final months payments etc now – as I’m just about to take over the full time child care….)

I do it myself for our nanny. Its not difficult once you’ve worked out how to use the HMRC software. The hardest thing was the getting my head around the tax/NI thing but it sounds like you may understand that already.

I would advise against farming it out because if they get it wrong you’re still the one that’s liable. I’d put the money towards sorting out a decent employment contract as when things go wrong or get complicated that’s where you’ll save yourself some pain not 30 minutes each month doing the RTI submission.

Oh, and I would start the RTI thing NOW because you can’t submit anything until you have your account set up and it takes HMRC a few weeks to create it.