Time tracking for R&D claim purposes

[MarjorieC]

Hi everyone,

Our company does not use timesheet for payroll because every staff is on annual salary. But I would like to use some kind of time tracking to be able to support our R&D claim. Is there a way to use MYOB timesheet for this purpose only? Basically I would like to record the number of hours that have been dedicated to specific fields of R&D for each employee and still record my pays as usual.

Is this doable on MYOB AccountRight? Any advice will be appreciated.

[Komal_S]

Hi @MarjorieC 

You could look at creating hourly payroll categories for these R&D fields and then enter timesheets to keep a record of the number of hours associated with them. However, please do note that while entering a pay run, these unprocessed timesheets would show up in the Process Payroll window and the person processing payroll would have to be really careful as they can accidentally record pay run with these timesheets otherwise. 

Let us know if you have further questions on this. 

[MarjorieC]

Thanks very much Komal, I have tried playing around with that on Clearwater and you're right, this might end up in extra hours mistakenly entered in pay slips.

Unless I could use the 'Automatically Adjust Base Hourly or Base Salary Details' box when creating the payroll category. I have tried ticking that box but the hours keep being added to my standard pays instead of adjusting them. It works fine for employees on 'Base salary' but it doesn't for those on 'Base Hourly'. Am I missing something?

If I can fix this issue then I would be happy to go with this solution.

Otherwise I could simply use Activity Slips and enter non-chargeable activities, what do you think?

[Komal_S · Accepted solution]

Hi @MarjorieC 

Automatically adjust base hourly or salary will work for both hourly and salary employees and it reduces the base salary/hourly amount by the number of hours you've entered in the R&D  category. It would not be recommended to use this option in your situation. As an example, if you normally enter 40 hours under base hourly, and then 4 hours are entered for the new R&D category, the base hourly would reduce to 36 hours in this pay run.

A better option would be to deselect these timesheets while processing payroll and then process normally as you've always done. But if it creates room for error, you can ensure that the payroll category for R&D has the regular rate multiplied by zero under Payroll>>Payroll Categories ensuring "Automatically adjust base hourly or salary" is unticked. This would enable you to just record the number of hours against the R&D category.

You could also look at recording activity slips with non-chargeable rates but in this case, you will have to run Activity Slip Employee Summary/Detail report to check how many total hours have been recorded against any employee in a specific time period. You can try running this report in the Clearwater report to see if that reports everything according to your requirements. 

[MarjorieC]

Brilliant, I'll go with the regular rate multiplied by zero, thanks Komal!