What is the difference between an FPS and an EPS?

In practice, in the UK

The two submissions cover different situations, and confusing them leaves HMRC holding an incomplete picture of what an employer owes. An FPS is the routine submission tied to actual pay: it reports what each employee was paid and what was deducted, and an employer sends one every time employees are paid, without exception. An EPS instead reports things that do not arise from a specific payment to a specific employee — recovering statutory sick, maternity or other parental pay, for instance, or telling HMRC that no employees were paid in a particular period at all. A period with no EPS is not necessarily an error, since many employers never need one, but a period where an EPS should have been sent and was not can leave an employer’s HMRC account overstating what it owes.

In Odoo

Where Odoo’s payroll functionality or a connected payroll system generates RTI submissions, it needs to distinguish clearly between what belongs on the FPS for a given pay run and what belongs on a separate EPS, since the two feed different figures into HMRC’s records. A business relying on a specialist payroll provider alongside Odoo should confirm which system is responsible for EPS submissions, since it is easy for adjustments of this kind to fall between two systems that each assume the other is handling it.

Common mistakes

• Assuming every payroll adjustment can be captured through the FPS alone, when some only belong on an EPS.
• Failing to send an EPS to recover statutory payments the employer is entitled to reclaim.
• Leaving responsibility for EPS submissions unclear when payroll and accounting run on separate systems.