To be entitled to SMP your employee must have worked for you for 26 weeks going into the qualifying week (i.e. you must have processed pay in Payroll for this employee for the previous 26 weeks).
Also, the employee's average weekly earnings are greater than £111.
Statutory Maternity Pay - HMRC
Once you have process SMP for the employee you can reclaim by submitting and EPS. The EPS form will update automatically with the correct amounts.
Get financial help with statutory pay - HMRC
Step 1.
Head to Employees > Statutory Payments, and click on the 'Add statutory leave' button.
Step 2.
Select the relevant 'Employee' from the drop down list, and 'Maternity' from the 'Statutory leave' drop down.
You will now be able to enter the 'baby due date' .
The employee's AWE (average weekly earnings) will automatically be calculated based on the baby due date you entered and the employee's earnings to date.
Work out Average Weekly Earnings (AWE)Enter the 'Requested MPP (Maternity Pay Period) start' for the employee and the end date if known or leave this blank to calculate automatically.
Click on the 'Save' button to complete.
The entry will be updated in the Statutory Payment Report under Employees > Statutory Payments. You can edit or delete the entry.
Processing Pay with SMP
When processing payroll for the employee the basic pay field will be clear and the SMP field is updated automatically.
How to process payroll
If you have an advanced company SMP policy you can run the SMP calculator and top up the salary as appropriate by adding an amount into the 'Basic pay' field
Reclaiming SMP
To reclaim the employees SMP you will need to submit an EPS on the Payroll > RTI > File EPS menu. The EPS will automatically update the 'YTD SMP recovered' box with 92% or if you are eligible to reclaim 103%, both the 'YTD SMP recovered' and 'YTD SMP NIC recovered' boxes will be updated appropriately.
Submitting an EPS