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Paying Your Team

Paying your team is an essential part of running a business. This guide walks you through running a pay run in Workmax — from checking you are ready, through entering hours and earnings, to submitting payroll to HMRC.

Running Payroll​

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Before running payroll, make sure you have set up your payroll settings, your pay calendars, and added your employees to Workmax.

  1. Sign in to your "Workmax" account with an admin account.
  2. Go to the "Payroll" section.
  3. In the "Next pay run" area, select the Pay calendar you want to run, then click on the "Run Payroll Now" button.
  4. Payroll readiness — before the pay run opens, Workmax shows a readiness checklist covering People data, Approvals, Payroll feed and Employees. Review any items that need attention (for example missing employee bank details, pension setup, or statutory payments to review). You can use "Refresh" to re-check.
  5. Hours and earnings — review each employee's pay. At the top, summary cards show Gross pay, Deductions, Contributions, Net pay and Total cost. For each employee you can:
    • Open their row to edit earnings and hours, including overtime and statutory payments (SSP, SMP, SPP, SAP and other parental pay).
    • Add one-off deductions or contributions.
    • View their timesheets, time off, expenses and benefits.
    • Check their pension / auto-enrolment assessment.
  6. If prompted, click on the "Sync pay items" button to pull the latest approved timesheets, time off, expenses and benefits into the pay run.
  7. Click on the "Save & review" button (or "Save as draft" to come back later).
  8. Review — check the totals. If this pay period falls at the tax year end, Workmax asks you to confirm whether this is the final payroll of the tax year. Expand the sections to review the tax, NI and take-home breakdowns.
  9. Click on the "Submit payroll" button.
  10. Confirmation — Workmax confirms the pay run has been submitted and shows a summary. You can "Download summary" or return to the dashboard.

What happens when you submit​

When you submit a pay run, Workmax will:

  • Generate a Full Payment Submission (FPS) for HMRC, submitted on the scheduled payday.
  • Mark all pay items as paid (timesheets, time off, benefits, expenses and attachment of earnings).
  • Publish payslips so employees can view them from their portal.
  • Create pension contribution files to submit to your workplace pension provider.
  • Update employees' year-to-date figures.
  • Create the payment instruction so you can pay your employees.

After submitting, you can view the payroll at any time, pay your employees, or revert the payroll if you need to start again. If you have any questions or need help, please contact Workmax Support.