Here’s a selection of things we’re currently thinking about. It’s a snapshot of our March roadmap, crimped from an email we sent to our customers earlier today.
HMRC recognition 💥
A couple of months ago we became a UK recognised payroll provider, which means we’re now on the big list.
That one was around 7 months in the making. Feels good.
Will get round to slamming a “HMRC recognised” badge on the website at some point.
New tax year 🍾
The new tax year starts next month on 6th April, and for us that means building a bunch of end of year bits:
• P60s (a summary of all the tax you’ve paid for the tax year)
• Updating our monthly “RTI” submissions to HMRC to include a few new end of year specific fields
• Shifting our calculation logic to the new tax / NI rates for 2021-22
We’ve also got to the normal end of year responsibilities that go with being a business. I’m spending this morning figuring out how to submit our end of year accounts and confirmation statement to companies house. Probably another product in there somewhere…
Xero integration 0️⃣
Our Xero integration getting there! The connection flow is hooked up in our web tool (pictured above). We’ve just submitted our first Xero journal following a payroll run after a morning of faffy debugging - some annoying 1p discrepancies here and there, a result of the peculiar rounding logic that HMRC impose on us.
The plus out of all this is that the bug was highlighted from the credits and debits on the Xero journal not balancing by 1p. We’re now adding validation before each payroll run that the books will balance if payroll is run in its current state. If the books don’t balance, we’ll catch it before anything happens for our customers. Yay reconciliation.
Our Xero integration has now rolled out for all customers ✅ We plan to scope out getting on the Xero app marketplace soon as another growth channel to test.
Payments 💸
We’re still investigating how to make payments instant. We spent Jan/Feb talking to Modulr, Railsbank, Truelayer and Plaid about the possibility of setting up eMoney accounts for our customers to transfer money into via Open Banking payment initiation, and then out via eMoney bulk payments.
However, recently we’ve stumbled upon the poorly documented Open Banking bulk payments API. It’s literally been left out of the main API docs and the Open Banking folk at Monzo didn’t know about it till last week. But it works, and we’re talking to one of the few companies who’ve integrated with it as an agent of the FCA.
If that all checks out, we’ll be able to provide you bulk payment functionality without the eMoney account in the middle, which cuts out loads of faff. Fingers crossed!
Still a little scoping to be done until we can provide an ETA on this one, but we’re hopeful we’ll be able to get something working.
Nest 🐣
Nest have (finally) granted us access to their test site, which means we can start building functionality to auto-enrol new employees and post updates.
We don’t plan to start work on this for now, just because there’s things we absolutely have to do sooner (end of year stuff) and features we’ll be prioritising over Nest (instant payments). Still, good to have unblocked.
API 🗼
There’s so many things we want to do right now (improve a bunch of flows in the frontend, clearly position our landing page instead of some software-api hybrid thing), and high up the list is to expose a public API with best in class documentation.
We’ve been battle-testing our core payroll logic with our customers and now have confidence that an API is something we’ll be able to offer soon. We’ll keep you updated!
Chill pill 🧘
We’re going to take a few days off on 15th-17th March. It’s been pretty non-stop since December. We’re both fatigued and need some time to recharge 💪
Hi 👋
We’re currently working super closely with our first few customers, getting our product purring before scaling up and exposing our public payroll API.
If you’d like to be our next customer, we’d love to chat. If you’re a small business wanting a slicker payroll experience or a founder who wants to offer payroll in their product then you could be a perfect fit. Feel free to drop in a meeting here.
Here’s a selection of things we’re currently thinking about. It’s a snapshot of our March roadmap, crimped from an email we sent to our customers earlier today.
HMRC recognition 💥
A couple of months ago we became a UK recognised payroll provider, which means we’re now on the big list.
That one was around 7 months in the making. Feels good.
Will get round to slamming a “HMRC recognised” badge on the website at some point.
New tax year 🍾
The new tax year starts next month on 6th April, and for us that means building a bunch of end of year bits:
• P60s (a summary of all the tax you’ve paid for the tax year)
• Updating our monthly “RTI” submissions to HMRC to include a few new end of year specific fields
• Shifting our calculation logic to the new tax / NI rates for 2021-22
We’ve also got to the normal end of year responsibilities that go with being a business. I’m spending this morning figuring out how to submit our end of year accounts and confirmation statement to companies house. Probably another product in there somewhere…
Xero integration 0️⃣
Our Xero integration getting there! The connection flow is hooked up in our web tool (pictured above). We’ve just submitted our first Xero journal following a payroll run after a morning of faffy debugging - some annoying 1p discrepancies here and there, a result of the peculiar rounding logic that HMRC impose on us.
The plus out of all this is that the bug was highlighted from the credits and debits on the Xero journal not balancing by 1p. We’re now adding validation before each payroll run that the books will balance if payroll is run in its current state. If the books don’t balance, we’ll catch it before anything happens for our customers. Yay reconciliation.
Our Xero integration has now rolled out for all customers ✅ We plan to scope out getting on the Xero app marketplace soon as another growth channel to test.
Payments 💸
We’re still investigating how to make payments instant. We spent Jan/Feb talking to Modulr, Railsbank, Truelayer and Plaid about the possibility of setting up eMoney accounts for our customers to transfer money into via Open Banking payment initiation, and then out via eMoney bulk payments.
However, recently we’ve stumbled upon the poorly documented Open Banking bulk payments API. It’s literally been left out of the main API docs and the Open Banking folk at Monzo didn’t know about it till last week. But it works, and we’re talking to one of the few companies who’ve integrated with it as an agent of the FCA.
If that all checks out, we’ll be able to provide you bulk payment functionality without the eMoney account in the middle, which cuts out loads of faff. Fingers crossed!
Still a little scoping to be done until we can provide an ETA on this one, but we’re hopeful we’ll be able to get something working.
Nest 🐣
Nest have (finally) granted us access to their test site, which means we can start building functionality to auto-enrol new employees and post updates.
We don’t plan to start work on this for now, just because there’s things we absolutely have to do sooner (end of year stuff) and features we’ll be prioritising over Nest (instant payments). Still, good to have unblocked.
API 🗼
There’s so many things we want to do right now (improve a bunch of flows in the frontend, clearly position our landing page instead of some software-api hybrid thing), and high up the list is to expose a public API with best in class documentation.
We’ve been battle-testing our core payroll logic with our customers and now have confidence that an API is something we’ll be able to offer soon. We’ll keep you updated!
Chill pill 🧘
We’re going to take a few days off on 15th-17th March. It’s been pretty non-stop since December. We’re both fatigued and need some time to recharge 💪
Hi 👋
We’re currently working super closely with our first few customers, getting our product purring before scaling up and exposing our public payroll API.
If you’d like to be our next customer, we’d love to chat. If you’re a small business wanting a slicker payroll experience or a founder who wants to offer payroll in their product then you could be a perfect fit. Feel free to drop in a meeting here.
