Can you trust payroll to caluclate your maternity/ Shared Parental Leave correctly?

We wish the answer to this one was yes... but sadly it is not.

In the last month alone we have worked on the following cases:

• A school who didn't pay the summer holiday full pay owed, then claimed to have calculated what was owed, but gave a figure that was £700 lower than it should have been.

• A school who said thay had overpaid a member of staff two years ago and had been claiming back money ever since to pay back thousands.... we did the maths and it turned out that all along they had actually owed her.

• A school who had kept paying statutory payments throughout the returned holiday and didn't think they needed to then make these payments later on.

In all of these cases payroll sent convincing letters/ emails summarising their calculations, and spreadsheets showing breakdowns. All of them later conceeded that they had been wrong, but in most cases only when we redid the maths and sent it back to them with concrete figures.

When you go on maternity leave you should be able to trust HR and payroll to process your leave and pay correctly - and often this does happen - but you cannot rely on it. It is wise to have an idea in your head of what your gross pay will be each month. Payroll systems process statutory payments slightly differently from school to school - so it is not an exact art - but you can get a very good idea. Some schools work out the statutory payments owed to the day and pay that for the month, whereas others pay it in whole weeks, based on which month the first day of the week is in - if they do it like this you will get 5 weeks pay one month and then perhaps 4 the next and so on. Over the course of your leave it will balance out.

Our SPL plans come with an indication of the gross pay you will receive each week, which helps you to keep an eye on your pay throughout the year. The team and I are also always happy to cast an eye over payment schedules if school offer them, and payslips for customers who think they have been paid wrong. This is included in your package if you sign up for any variation of package A or B. Full peace of mind - we know that not all of you will want to be doing maths and dealing with spreadsheets at the same time you are dealing with nappies and broken sleep!

If you have done your SPL plan yourself and think that school are not paying you correctly - we can still support you via option C.