Take the pain out of payrolls

Payroll calculations are a considerable headache for small businesses.

Not only may normal pay and overtime have to be worked out, but there are also tax and National Insurance contributions to contend with. These calculations are not usually very difficult, but they are repetitive and time-consum ing. Also, employees do not like mistakes in their pay, and some care is needed if these are to be avoided.

Micro-Aid's Payroll could, I think, be of considerable help to many small businesses.

It will cater for up to 100 employees and with all tax codes (up to a maximum of 480). As regards National Insurance, the program deals with non-contracted-out employees only.

There are separate versions for weekly and monthly earners and for disc and cassette users.

I found Payroll easy to use and the manual comprehensive. It included a partial program listing showing the variables which are used to hold the Inland Revenue and national insurance data.

The user is free to alter these when required (for example after the Budget) or Micro-Aid offers an update contract.

To calculate the pay of say an hourly-paid employee, the user would be presented with a number of options such as enter normal hours, overtime hours, bonus pay and so on. The program will work out all the figures needed and will print a wage-slip.

The use of a printer is, in fact, optional and the calculated figures could be copied manually from the screen.

As cassette versions of the programs are available, the system can therefore be very economical in hardware terms.

At the end of the run, period and culmulative-to-datc summaries can be printed out for each employee and companywide.

There is an enormous variety of payroll calculations and I checked only a few situations. I found all of these to be calculated correctly.

Ken Garrett