Request clients’ HMRC tax coding and student loan change notices in bulk
This article explains how to request an HMRC tax coding or student loan change notice on behalf of your bulk payroll clients.
Within the FreeAgent app, we refer to both tax code notices and student loan change notices simply as ‘HMRC notices’.
Please note:
- To check for HMRC tax coding and student loan change notices using FreeAgent, you need to enable electronic notifications for these notices in your client's PAYE Online account and be authorised to file payroll on behalf of your clients.
- You’ll only be able to view and access a client’s account from your Practice Dashboard if the account has been linked, added or transferred to your dashboard. If you have only been added to your client’s account as a user, the account won’t appear on your dashboard.
- If you don’t file clients’ payroll in bulk, you can switch to an individual client’s account and request HMRC notices from within their account.
Log in to your Practice Dashboard and select the ‘Payroll’ tab at the top of the screen to access the bulk payroll filing dashboard. This will list all clients included in your bulk payroll.
To request new HMRC notices in bulk, select ‘Request HMRC notices’.
This will update the dashboard to show all new notices from HMRC up to this point for the clients included in your bulk payroll.
If you are using this functionality for the first time, FreeAgent will retrieve the most recent notice for each employee for the current tax year only if there is a discrepancy between their current tax code or student loan status and the most recent notice details. For any subsequent requests, FreeAgent will retrieve all new notices issued after the date of the initial request.
This will retrieve notices for all client businesses included in your bulk payroll by matching their PAYE references provided they have enabled online notifications for these notices. If there are any clients who you want to exclude from checking for new notices, select 'No' to the left of the client’s name in the ‘Included’ column. Please note that this will also exclude that particular client from the month’s payroll run if you don’t switch the setting back to ‘Yes’ after you have run the check for new notices. You will need agent access to client businesses for them to be included in the check for notices.
Here you’ll see how many HMRC notices require action for each of your bulk payroll clients.
Select the number of notices listed next to the relevant client name to view all the HMRC notices for this client.
You can approve notices on behalf of clients, as well as remove them. You’ll also be able to view upcoming notices that require no actions yet, as well as a history of the notices that have been approved and removed.
If you don’t use the bulk payroll functionality through the dashboard and choose to file payroll individually from individual clients’ accounts, you will be able to switch to that client to retrieve notices and take any action required for them from there, the same as a direct level 8 user would. Read more about HMRC notices.