Payment summaries not including all allowances

[Bookie2093]

I have been notified by the clients accountant that the total of the PAYMENT SUMMARIES VERTIFICATION REPORT for 2019 - does not match the PAYROLL ACTIVITY SUMMARY.  I've searched and found that two of the many allowances has not been included - I did not set these up. They appear to be set up the same in the Payroll Category.  Any ideas what would cause this to happen?  and whilst it's too late to fix 2019, is there a way to check these for 2020, before I actually run the Payroll Verification report?  Thank you.

[Steven_M · Accepted solution]

Hi @Bookie2093 

TIP: When it comes to payment summary checking you actually want to compare the payment summary details to the Payroll Register report. The reason for that is the Payroll Activity report looks at the actual pays, whereas the Payroll Register looks at the employee's card pay history in which the payment summaries are based on. So if you made a manual change to the employee's card history this will be reflected in the payment summaries but will not appear in the Payroll Activity report. More information can be found on Payroll Activity Summary vs Payroll Register Summary report This would be the same for payroll reporting (STP) as well - best to compare the two reports and use the Register report as the basis.

In terms of your actual question, when preparing payment summaries using the Payment Summary Assistant on Step 4: Payment Summary Fields you get three columns. The first column is the payment summary fields with the last column being your AccountRight payroll categories (middle columns is the description field for your payment summary fields). You want to go through the payment summary fields list and tick the relevant payroll categories that fall into that field. For example, if you wanted to have Base Hourly go into Gross Payments you would select Gross Payments on the left-hand side and tick Base Hourly on the right. 

Should a value not appear be appearing on a payment summary you want to ensure that the relevant payment summary field has been selected for that payroll category. However, with the introduction of Payroll Reporting (STP) payment summaries are a thing of the past.  So going forward to ensure that you are reporting the field correctly you want to ensure that you have the appropriate ATO Reporting Category selected for the payroll category i.e. Payroll>>Payroll Categories>>Wages>>Selecting the desired wage category and selecting the desired ATO Reporting Category.

[Bookie2093]

Thank you for your response .... yes that makes sense now.  I had forgotten this part of the step ...