Payroll Catgegories for Travel - Food & Incidentals

Jen65

HI, question on payroll categories, we have a few staff travelling overseas to work and they are paid a Food & Incidental allowance.  Each employee gets paid a different amount, do I need to set up a different category for each person to pay them this allowance ?

gavin12345

Hi @Jen65 

 

Not sure I agree - creating a new allowance for each employee simply adds to the complexity of your file. Lots of employer complain about having too many payroll categories and that MYOB often does not allow you to delete it once it has been used.

 

If different employees will use different ATO category assignment, then yes you will need different payroll categories, but not if all assigned to same ATO Category.

 

It does depend on how the allowance will be entered.  Due to the nature of the allowance you mentioned, this is likely to be a manually entered amount each payroll, or possibly a standard amount each pay.

 

You could set up just one allowance - call it what you like  eg 'Food & Incidentals', set it as salary (unless rate is linked directly to hours or payrate) and under employee select affected employees who will use this allowance.

 

When processing pay you can manually add the relevant amount for each employee. Or you can set the amount on their Standard Pay screen if the amount will be regular. Each employee can be set a different amount. One can be set to $44, one to $144.

 

Regards

Gavin