Have other companies been experiencing problems with HMRC rejecting FPS submissions generated by QuickBooks Payroll?

Hello there, stobonet.

Let me help you troubleshoot the issue with your FPS submission.

To begin, let's ensure that everything is aligned with HMRC's requirements for a successful submission. Here are some factors to review:

• Complete your pay run 
• Use only accepted characters in employee names
• Keep addresses within the 35-character limit
• Assign National Insurance (NI) letters correctly by gender

To locate any employee details that might be causing the FPS submission to reject, you can run the Employee Detail Report and check their information.

Here's how:

1. Go to the Report menu.
2. Search for and select the Employee Detail Report
3. Review the information in the report, including employee names, addresses, and National Insurance (NI) letters.
4. Compare this information against HMRC’s requirements mentioned above to identify any discrepancies.

To learn about other FPS submission issues, refer to this article:

Troubleshooting FPS submissions in QuickBooks Online Payroll.

You can add a comment below if you have follow-up questions.

Completely shambolic. Replies are rejected as not authenticated. Dates are all wrong - Dec 30 2026 - which is likely to mean that all kinds of end of year processing will fail.

To add to my previous reply. The bugs in handling forum replies depend on the browser used. Problems with Chrome, none with Firefox. Since QBO is supposed to prefer Chrome, the FPS error could be a weird interaction between browser and backend processing - shouldn't happen but who knows?

Since I appear to be able to respond using Firefox, let me restate the problem.

In November we processed our payroll, generated an FPS, submitted it and it was accepted quickly.

Between November and December *no changes of any kind* were made to our QBO payroll information.

In December we processed our payroll - using identical information - but the FPS was rejected as failing to pass HMRC's validity checks.

So, either (a) a bug has been introduced in the QBO code that generates the FPS, causing HMRC to flag an error, or (b) HMRC has changed its code to identify errors that it did not flag previously. Which is it? and have others run into the same issue? Given recent experience my bet is on (a) but please don't waste my time by providing basic information rather than an answer to the issue highlighted.

I appreciate you taking the time to troubleshoot the issue you've experience while posting in this forum and for providing a detailed explanation of your payroll submission concern, Stobonet.

To ensure you can submit your FPS to HMRC promptly, let's ensure that your FPS details are accurate. That said, I suggest checking the following information:

• Complete your pay run 
• Use only accepted characters in employee names
• Keep addresses within the 35-character limit
• Assign National Insurance (NI) letters correctly by gender

If some of the information above is incorrect, you can visit this article to learn how to correct it: Troubleshooting FPS submissions in QuickBooks Online Payroll.

If everything appears to be correct on your end, I suggest reaching out to our payroll live support. They have the necessary tools and expertise to thoroughly check this issue and provide a tailored solution, ensuring that you can submit everything on time.

To contact them, here's how:

1. Select the Help (?) icon.
2. Go to the Search tab, then click the Contact Us button.
3. Type your concern in the What can we help you with? field, then click Continue.
4. Select how you want to connect with our experts.

To learn more about our support hours, please visit this article: How to get help with QuickBooks.

Feel free to post here again if you have additional concerns.