What is a P60?

In practice, in the UK

A P60 only ever covers a single employment and a single tax year, which is why someone who changes jobs during the year receives a P60 only from whichever employer they were with at the year end, with earlier employment in that year evidenced by other documents instead. Employees rely on the P60 for a range of things outside payroll itself — mortgage applications, tax credit or benefit claims, reclaiming overpaid tax — so an error on it, or a late issue, has consequences that reach well beyond the payroll department that produced it. Because it is generated automatically from the payroll records for the year, a P60 is really only as accurate as the underlying payroll data, and a mistake made mid-year that nobody corrected shows up faithfully reproduced on the certificate.

In Odoo

Where payroll runs through Odoo or a connected payroll system, the P60 is generated from the accumulated pay and deduction figures for each employee across the tax year, so its accuracy depends entirely on every pay run through the year having been processed correctly. Correcting an error after the P60 has already been issued means reissuing the certificate, not just adjusting a future payslip, which is a good reason to reconcile payroll figures well before year-end rather than after.

Common mistakes

• Assuming a P60 should be issued for every employment during the year rather than only the one held at year end.
• Treating an error found after issuing the P60 as something a future payslip can quietly absorb.
• Losing track of employees who left partway through the year and are not owed a P60 from that employment.