Hours your CIS bureau can use on Friday

What actually comes out

A CSV of approved weeks. You pick the week, and you can narrow it to one job. The job selector narrows the rows and never the columns, so a whole-firm file and a one-job file are the same shape and whatever reads them does not have to care which you sent.

It is an export of approved weeks, which is the important word. A week is in the file because a manager read it and put their name to it. Nothing draft, nothing provisional and nothing still under query goes out, so the bureau is not the first human to look at the numbers.

Every figure in it was worked out by code from the events of the week rather than typed by anybody: the hours, the breaks, the paid minutes, the rate that was in effect. That is why the total and the days underneath it cannot disagree. If a line looks wrong, the days behind it are still there to read, with a sentence each saying how the figure was arrived at.

One CSV shape today, and we will say so

There is one layout at the moment. Per-package templates, the ones that drop straight into the payroll software your bureau actually runs, are on the list and are not built. A page that implied otherwise would survive right up until somebody asked for a sample file, which is about ten seconds.

If you are a bureau and the shape matters to you, that is a conversation worth having early rather than late, and there is a page about exactly that at for accountants and CIS bureaux. What we think a usable week looks like, field by field, is set out in what a CIS bureau needs from a week of timesheets.

Deductions worked out, nothing filed with HMRC

Said plainly, because this is the question a bureau asks second and a contractor asks first. Nothing here is submitted to HMRC. What the product does is the arithmetic. The office records each subcontractor’s CIS status as HMRC gave it, and the deduction for the tax month is worked out by code from approved hours and the rate in effect: 0%, 20%, or 30% where no status is recorded, shown as not verified.

Out of that come a payment and deduction statement per subcontractor, and a CSV laid out for the monthly return, so whoever files it is copying checked figures rather than adding up a photograph. Your bureau, or your own payroll department, still verifies, checks and files, exactly as it does today. An approved day with no rate set is priced at nothing, and the statement and the file both say how many such days there are, so an under-stated deduction is visible rather than hidden.

• Not done here: verifying a subcontractor with HMRC. The office records the result.
• Not done here: filing the monthly return.
• Done here: the hours, approved by a named person, in a file.
• Done here: the deduction worked out, a statement per subcontractor, and a return-ready CSV.

Where the hours come from

From WhatsApp messages the crew were sending anyway. A man says he is on and says he is off, and that becomes an event carrying the site it was matched to and how it was recorded. The week is built from those events, and the office never retypes anything. The detail is on WhatsApp timesheets.

That is what changes the bureau’s week rather than the export format. The file being clean is nice. The file arriving on Friday rather than the following Wednesday is what gets a payroll out on time.

A correction still happens, and it happens before the export rather than after it. A worker or the office can ask for one, a manager confirms it, the week is reopened with a reason and the worker is told. What leaves in the file is the version somebody agreed to.

The things people ask

What it costs

Everyone using it counts, managers and office staff too. Cancel whenever you like.