Companies Urged to Offer a ‘Payroll Giving’ Scheme in Their Workplace

For Payroll Giving Month, PayCaptain – a cloud-based payroll software solution – and its partner GoodPAYE are urging companies to consider offering a ‘Payroll Giving’ scheme in their workplace.

‘Payroll Giving’ is a simple and tax-efficient scheme that makes it super easy for employees of any business to make a big difference to the causes they care about.

Anna Buckle, director of operations and impact at PayCaptain, commented: “If you are already giving to charity (or plan to) then doing it through ‘Payroll Giving’ is a no-brainer – the donation comes from your Gross pay (meaning you will pay less tax as a result), and it helps the charity know that they will have consistent revenue from you (without needing to claim Gift Aid on it) – a real win-win for all involved”.

Whilst ‘Payroll Giving’ is a way of giving money to charity without paying tax on it, Buckle explains that it  “must be paid through PAYE from someone’s wages or pension via a registered payroll giving agency”. Paycaptain.Org is a HMRC-approved Payroll Giving Agency built to streamline the process of making donations to good causes via a payroll process. Whilst its schemes are currently available for companies using the PayCaptain Payroll solution and GoodPAYE only, it has future plans to integrate with other payroll solutions to enable them to offer a seamless payroll giving experience for their customers.

Buckle continued: “Charitable giving is a totally personal, individual choice – therefore, employees can choose to donate to any registered charity of their choice. To date, over 2,000 charities are set up with Paycaptain.Org, allowing employees across the country to make regular donations from their gross pay each month. Not only does this help businesses work towards ESG objectives, it is also a great way to add to an employee benefits package making it easier for people to make a difference to charities close to their hearts”.

Tony Charalambides, CEO at GoodPAYE commented: “Our mission is to make payroll giving accessible to every employee across the UK, so GoodPAYE strongly supports all conversations with government to make payroll giving accessible to every employee across the UK. We are looking to transform giving at work and are calling for it to be mandatory for all businesses over 1000 employees to offer payroll giving as a benefit to their employees within this parliament.

Charalambides added: “It would of course be an individual’s choice whether to donate or not but offering the ability to every employee to donate to charities in the most impactful and tax efficient way through payroll giving would be transformative for civil society and raise £100ms extra revenue each year.”

Working with employers of all sizes to promote payroll giving to their employees via a range of traditional and digital fundraising techniques,GoodPAYE also works directly with charities to help them generate a new, regular and reliable income stream via payroll giving.

Also, as part of Payroll Giving Month, a Change.org petition has been set up to try and incentivise businesses to offer payroll giving to their employees. For more information, visit: https://www.change.org/p/urge-companies-to-offer-a-payroll-giving-scheme-in-their-workplace

CASE STUDY 1: Jane Frost, Director of HR Services at Roadchef, explained details of their own Payroll Giving initiatives: “Payroll Giving is a great tool for our employees as it enables them to give a regular donation, to their favourite charity, in an easy tax efficient way each payday. Having the charity donation option in the PayCaptain app means employees can have the flexibility to add, amend and pause as they need to according to their individual financial circumstances”.

CASE STUDY 2: Stella Renwick, Charity Manager at Home-Start South Leicestershire, also shared their experience of receiving donations through Payroll Giving: “Payroll Giving is one of the most efficient ways for Home-Start South Leicestershire to receive donations. Although the values are not huge it gives us a consistent income and saves time for us versus traditional giving, as we do not need to claim back tax from the HMRC for those donations. It’s also more beneficial to the kind people making the donation as it reduces their taxable income too. We are a small charity so bringing in donations efficiently allows us to have a greater impact on the families we work with”.