Jacquie's come to the rescue again, download her handy flexible furlough calculator
Flexible furlough calculations
So, the 1st of July has come and gone, and we are now into flexible furlough. The basics of how these works were covered in the technical update for June. This article extends that information and goes further into how the calculations will work.
HMRC has a calculator on its website that enables you to enter dates and amounts but you have to do each calculation separately and it is time-consuming and only allows you to work this out for a single employee for a single period. At the bottom of this article is a spreadsheet (used on Thank Furlough it’s Flexible Friday) which has been extended to allow you to input total normal hours, hours worked and income to calculate how the split of hours affects income, and how much can be reclaimed back each week or month until October.
Note: the spreadsheet was designed to be used for your internal calculations – please be very careful if you want to use this for your actual calculations as the HMRC may well have programmed in additional calculations that I have not covered.
There are two worksheets – one for monthly paid and one for weekly paid. Please note however that this (as with the HMRC calculator) can only deal with a fixed amount and not flexible amounts.
Monthly paid
For this sheet, you need to input only four pieces of information. It works from the first day to the last day of each month from July to October. Note – the spreadsheet has some pre-loaded figures in black – these are the cells into which you can enter your relevant information. The figures in red are the automatically calculated answers. Please be careful with the ‘red’ cells – the cells are not locked, so if you overwrite a ‘red’ cell you will lose the formulae. This is all you should need to enter:
- relevant month – select from the drop-down menu only – no need to type it in. Depending on the month selected it will automatically calculate the number of working days in that month – note this is based on a working week of Monday – Friday. If your working week is different from this, then you can over-type the number of working days in each month by looking at the calendar and over-writing the formula but be careful that September is shorter by 1 day.
- The full monthly salary – this can be either a fixed salary or the higher or the monthly average on relevant months. This is the same calculation we did for basic furlough calculations so you should be able to calculate this.
- The normal number of hours worked in a day.
- The number of days worked in the month. This can be full or partial days – it works on whatever the fraction of a day worked.
From this the sheet, you will see several figures appear. They are self-explanatory and show the split between worked and furlough salary, the furlough amount reduced to 80% (which is what is to be paid), and the amount that can be reclaimed for each month.
The sheet also calculates the amount of NICs and pension contributions that can be reclaimed in July – note if you select from August onwards, these cells will show zero as you can no longer reclaim these amounts.
Weekly paid
Weekly paid works very differently and please be aware that this sheet should only be used to illustrate how it works.
Furlough claims are based on weekly pay from the first of the month to the last day of the month. So, you can no longer claim for a part month – this means that in each month there are 5 claim periods.
If your pay dates are on different days, then this spreadsheet will show you how it works – use the HMRC claim to look at the actual dates you are using to claim back your furlough grant.
Again, you only must enter a few bits of information
- Normal weekly wage
- Normal working hours per week
- Number of hours worked in each week
Again, the figures should calculate automatically. Note that the calculation for the NIC reclaim for week 5 in July is an approximation based on 3 days out of 7 so you should use the HMRC calculator for this to confirm the amounts.
Caveat Emptor (let the buyer beware!)
Please note again that this is something I put together to show how this works and was asked to develop it further for members. It is not the HMRC calculator although the calculations are based on data entry into that system and the results obtained.
Please experiment and enjoy (if that is the correct word!) and happy flexible furlough calculations.
The Flexible Furlough calculator can be found here.
