The umbrella payroll readiness checklist

This checklist is deliberately boring. It is a list of things that are obvious in principle and frequently missing in practice, grouped by the part of the operation they belong to. Work through it honestly and the gaps will be clear.

Worker and contract data

• Every worker has one record, not one per agency relationship.
• Right-to-work status is held on the record with an expiry, and expiry is a control, not a report.
• Contract, rate and assignment history is versioned - you can see what was true on any past date.
• Leaver processing is triggered by the assignment ending, not by someone remembering.

Calculation

• Multiple income sources in one pay period produce a single cumulative PAYE and NI position.
• Personal allowance and NI thresholds are applied once per period, never once per source.
• Holiday pay accrual and payment are both evidenced, including where holiday is held rather than paid.
• Statutory payments are calculated from the same worker record as everything else.

Compliance and evidence

• Every control that runs is recorded with its outcome, not just its failures.
• Exceptions have a named approver and a reason, both retained.
• RTI submissions are linked to the pay run that produced them, with the HMRC response stored.
• PAYE and NI liability is visible as a funded or unfunded position before payment, not after.

Supply chain

• Agencies can self-serve worker and payroll status without emailing your team.
• Liability status is visible to the parties who carry the liability.
• Audit documents can be produced for a date range without a manual collation exercise.
• Access is permission-based, so a party sees their own supply chain and nobody else's.

If most of these are already true, your risk is concentrated in the few that are not. If most are not, the highest-value change is usually evidence rather than calculation - the calculation is generally right, it simply cannot be proved quickly.