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Accountants for care providers
Domiciliary care, supported living and care agencies, where payroll is the hard part.
The accounts are the easy part. The payroll is not.
A care business with twenty carers on rotas has more payroll complexity than a company ten times its size. Variable hours, sleep-ins, travel time between calls, holiday pay on variable hours, and a workforce that changes month to month. Nearly every problem we are asked to fix in this sector is a payroll problem.
- Weekly or monthly RTI payroll built from your rota, not from a guess.
- National Minimum Wage compliance - including the parts that catch people out: travel time between calls counts as working time, and unpaid travel is how otherwise careful employers end up underpaying.
- Holiday pay calculated correctly for staff on variable hours.
- Auto-enrolment and re-enrolment for a workforce with high turnover.
- Employment allowance, and whether your business qualifies.
The VAT trap in welfare services
Welfare services provided by a state-regulated provider are generally exempt from VAT. Exempt is not the same as zero rated, and the difference costs money: you do not charge VAT, but you also cannot reclaim the VAT on your costs.
If you have any taxable income alongside the exempt care work - training, consultancy, management charges, or rent - you are partly exempt, and only part of your input VAT is recoverable. There is a de minimis test, and businesses in this sector routinely fail it without realising. We will work out where you stand rather than assume.
Getting the structure right before the first carer is employed is far cheaper than unpicking it afterwards - the trading entity, the payroll scheme, the pension scheme, and how local authority and private income are kept apart in the books.
Common questions
Care providers - the questions we get asked
Do we charge VAT on care services?
Welfare services from a state-regulated provider are usually exempt, so no VAT on your invoices - but you also cannot reclaim VAT on your costs. If you have other taxable income too you are partly exempt, which needs calculating properly.
Does travel time between calls count for minimum wage?
Yes. Time spent travelling between one client and the next is working time for National Minimum Wage purposes. Not paying it is one of the most common compliance failures in domiciliary care.
Can you run the payroll from our rota system?
Yes. Send us the hours in whatever format the system exports and we will turn them into the payroll run, the payslips and the RTI submission.