Simplified payslip: a false clarification?
300,000,000 pay slips are issued in France every year, and France leads Europe with 50 lines on each slip. Over two years ago, the French government decided to launch a project to simplify the pay slip. All our tips and best practices on payroll can be found here.
CONTENTS
Context and timetable for the new payslip
The evolution of the simplified payslip concerns employers and employees under private law, and responds to the essential need for legibility and intelligibility in terms of payroll management.
The French payslip has inherited a stack of successive laws on contribution reductions (e.g. the Fillon law), tax exemptions or benefits (e.g. the CICE), different tax bases... The transition to the simplified payslip is well underway, but is taking place in stages:
- It currently concerns 10 pilot companies (Arkema, AFPA, BNP Paribas, Daher, Inovyn, Safran, Saint-Gobain, Société générale, Sopra Steria, Solvay), representing over 100,000 employees.
- On January 1, 2017, the decree of February 25, 2016 will apply to all companies of a certain size (300 employees or more).
- Generalization is planned for all companies on January 1, 2018.
To get closer to its European neighbors, who don't exceed 20 lines (16 in Belgium, 15 in Germany), France has launched this simplification project, which is supposed to be virtuous for those who read and prepare the payslip!
The expected benefits of the simplified payslip
In concrete terms, the new simplified payslip model features a number of significant improvements in presentation:
- easier-to-read headings.
- grouping of headings. For example, deductions now appear according to the type of risk covered (sickness, retirement, unemployment).
- a reduction in the number of rows (halved): for example, the reference to the organization to which the employer pays Social Security contributions and the number under which these contributions are paid have been removed.
- a reduction in the number of columns, e.g. the deletion of the rate and base columns.
- quicker reading of amounts (wages, contributions, exemptions) with two separate columns for the employee's share and the employer's share.
A simplified payslip, perhaps... but is it really clarified?
In reality, beyond optimizing the form, it seems that the new simplified payslip is a victim of its own rationalization:
- Opacity around the synthetic amounts, following the deletion of a certain amount of detailed information.
- Historical complexity of calculation rules still latent (no change to the underlying calculation mechanisms).
What will change for payroll professionals?
- Payroll software parameterization will have to continue unchanged, in order to maintain rigorous correspondence with accounting and to keep pace with future laws and decrees. A reduction in the workload for both software publishers and personnel administration departments is therefore not expected - quite the contrary...
- To help employees make the most of this new document, we'll need to educate them and support them through the changeover: a task that will probably fall to the company's payroll experts.
- Lower printing and mailing costs, thanks to several factors:
- the elimination of the obligation to provide an annual summary with the pay slip showing groupings of contributions.
- the mechanical reduction in the total number of pages of pay slips.
- dematerialization - an option available to employees from January 1, 2017 - which will lighten the employer's burden (production, editing) by dispensing with the need to send the pay slip to the employee.
What will persist for employees :
- the need to print out pay slips (eventually dematerialized) for their pension fund.
- the need to understand in depth the breakdown of their net salary, especially if income tax is deducted at source by the employer.
Conclusion
The new "simplified" payslip format makes it possible to lighten the presentation and hide the various criteria from view. However, it hardly solves the problem of the multiplicity of parameters involved in calculating the net salary. So choose a payroll solution that's right for you. Don't hesitate to compare the offers of several specialists to choose the one that will support you in these major upcoming changes.
Article translated from French