Long Service Leave

Hi carolineh 

If the employee is being given a number of hours on an entitlement, you could do a void pay adjustment rather than entering the figures on the employee’s card. A void pay is just a pay with all figures set to zero beyond what your adjusting.

Depending on the correction needed for this employee's accrual would determine the figure entered into the adjusting pay. A positive figure increases the entitlement balance on the employee's card, and a negative balance reduces it.

The additional column was added with the release of AccountRight 2020.2 and I’ve raised this with the relevant teams so they are aware of the change.

Hi Neil

Thank you for your reply.

I'm aware of the difference between positive and negative.   It only allows me to enter in one column - so I put my positive number in (because we're adding LSL that hadn't been accrued for years when it should have been), MYOB then in the next column minuses out the same amount and brings it back to zero, negating my positive number.

I'm unable to enter or adjust anything in any of the columns other than the first one.

Doing a zero pay is a bit of a pain and if I stuff it up, it's gone via STP too.  

Are you saying that in 2020.2 the function to add hours to the employee card for adjustments is now just another glitchy thing that doesn't work anymore?

If so, they need to remove the wiki instructions.

Hi carolineh 

In my own testing entering figures into the Balance Adjustment column for an entitlement, flowed through and added them to the total for that employee. Given in 2020.2, the Carry Over figure draws from the figures in the previous payroll year it may well indicate that the previous years figures had an adjustment to reduce that entitlement, or that the leave accrual entitlement is not set to carry the balance over at the end of the year.

Its worth noting that whichever way you add the figures, an employee’s leave accrual figures aren’t reported through STP. Although a void pay would create an STP update event, if this is reported it will report the employees YTD figures through to the ATO.   

Hi Neil

Thank you again for your reply.  

I agree, in my own experience too, it's very straightforward to add the balance entitlement and it flows through to the total for that employee but this is the first one I've had to do in 2020.2 as as you can see from my previously loaded screen shot, it's deducting it out instantly all on its own.

Good point in relation to being set to carry over entitlement from previous years but I just checked and this was set up from the start and as you know, once set it can't be changed so that's not the issue.

There were definitely no previous years' adjustments in place as not only has the file only been set up since 2018, they weren't accruing any entitlements at all as the person who set up the payroll didn't know how to do it so didn't do it!

So the solution is that 2020.2 is not working as per all the previous versions that we've been able to add missing entitlements very easily?

That has been a lovely clean function over the years to able to fix entitlements easily in the card.  Now it's a trap.  I only spotted it because I had to go back and double check and realised it had deleted it!

Should the technical department be advised of this glitch?  How do I do that?  Or am I wasting my time and no one there cares?   I'm starting to wonder of late!

Hi carolineh 

For auditing and record keeping purposes we do recommend making any adjustments outside of the carry over balance by use of a void pay adjustment to adjust the accrual figure. As such I would recommend at least trying the option of a void pay

That said I have passed your comments onto the relevant teams for their consideration and investigation.

I have had exactly the same problem as Caroline. Also, it's not happening to every employee - just 2 employees. No matter what I out in the balance column for LSL, it automatically turns to negative in the carry over column so the total ends up zero.

Hi Neil

I have done a Void pay but annoyingly this then shows the lump sum amount in YTD which is confusing as really it's not this year to date. 

But at least it's in!

I can't see why this would be considered Best Practice.

Thank you for passing on my comments.

It used to work really well so it must be a program glitch in 2020.2.

Extremely annoying.

I have to agree with you Caroline. It's a frustrating glitch. For me (so far) it only seems to be affecting long service leave for some reason. Also, I've noticed that when I make an adjustment it looks like it's working. But if I save and go back into that card, it will have defaulted back to a negative carry over and a zero total.

The column called 'balance adjustment' is meant to be for adjusting balances. The instructions at the top of the column when you hover over are "Type the number of hours you want to adjust the total by for each entitlement. Opening balances can be entered here".  Hopefully, this will be fixed soon.