The new way to create and assign pay items

[Erik_V]

Pay items used to be linked to individual employees, making it a pain to replicate the same pay item across multiple employees. Now, each pay item you create is saved to a business-wide list of pay items, making them easy to bulk edit and link to your employees.

This update not only simplifies your payroll setup, but also lays the groundwork for Single Touch Payroll compliance and many more future payroll improvements.

Creating and assigning pay items

You’ll notice a few differences in the way pay items are created in the newly renamed Pay items - earnings and deductions tab in your employees’ profiles.

The new employee tab for your pay items.

If you want to add a new pay item to an employee start by clicking into the Add earning or Add deduction dropdown list.

Add a new pay item by opening the dropdown list.

Want to add a pay item you’ve already created? It’s as easy as selecting it from the dropdown list. The pay item will be added to this employee with no extra data entry on your part.

Select from the dropdown list to add an existing pay item to an employee.

If you need to create a new pay item, select Create new earning or Create new deduction from their respective dropdown lists.

After filling in and saving the new pay item details, two things will happen. First, it will be linked to the employee you created it for. And second, it will be added to your business-wide list of pay items, ready to be linked to other employees.

Despite these exciting changes, we didn’t want to disrupt the tried and true payroll setup you’ve grown accustomed to. The good news is that you can still work with pay items at the employee level like usual and use the reusable pay items whenever it’s convenient for you.

Editing and unlinking pay items

If you want to change any details of a pay item or want to unlink it from an employee click the ellipses button.

Click the ellipses button to unlink or edit a pay item.

Note that any changes made to a pay item will affect every employee it’s linked to. If you want to create a unique pay item for a specific employee, it’s best to create a new one in their employee profile.

See the MYOB Essentials online help for more information on setting up pay items.

Your new pay items page

We’ve also added a new Pay items page to the Payroll menu.

The new 'Pay items' page lists every pay item you created.

Here you’ll find a list of every pay item you’ve created for your employees. Currently you can only view this list; but we’ll be building out this page in future updates, including the ability to create, edit and delete - so stay tuned! See the Pay items online help page for more information.

What’s this ‘ATO reporting category’ field? (Australia only)
ATO reporting categories are part of Single Touch Payroll (STP) - a new ATO reporting requirement coming later this year (if your business has 20 or more employees). If and when you start reporting using STP, every pay item in your business needs to be assigned an ATO reporting category to accurately report payroll information to the ATO.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to do anything with these categories just yet! We just want to familiarise you with some new terminology so you’re ready to hit the ground running when it’s time to start preparing your business for the changes.

Want to know more about STP? See the Single Touch Payroll online help page.

[tf]

My first time trying to use this new feature this morning and can't get it to work. Have to give an employee a "Privates Rate" of $16. Went through the process of creating that in my Pay Items list and putting it into his Earnings/Deductions, but when I go to Payroll, all that will come up is a $0 Privates Rate. I can get around this for this week's payroll by overriding the amount on his pay slip, but why isn't his payroll entry showing the same as his earnings/deductions list?

Pay Items listEmployee earnings Privates Rate = 16Payroll entry Privates Rate = 0

[Ubeen]

Not a fan when you have apprentices at different stages you have to go through and name all your overtime rates and other allowances different things just to be able to pay them all accordingly. You need to be able to have the same title for things and have the option to be able to change the pay rate without changing everyones. 

[Jordan3730]

I found this new feature to be cumbersome, very hard to manouvre around in and looks complex on the employee's pay slips.  A lot of work needs to be done to it before it can be considered user friendly.  I would like to return to the old format as quickly as possible. This is the worst upgrade yet.  

[WayneC]

This is a good start, but I am truly baffled why percentages and multiples still havent been included as a calculation option. We should be able to set up a pay item for Leave loading for example, that simply has a calculation of 17.5% of the employees hourly rate. Similarly, overtime should be calculated on multiples of the standard rate like 1.5 times or 2 times. This means then that they can be easily applied to any employee, and more importantly, easily changed if needed, without having to recalculate every employee with the pay item.

Why cant pay items be done the same as pay categories in MYOB Accountright? Surely the background code behind that can be easily tweaked to be implemented in Essentials instead of re-inventing the wheel as seem to be happening with this release.

[Gab-G1]

As Wayne said, a percentage calculation is required for leave loading and overtime too. Hopefully you can add this soon.

[StephaniePM]

I do not like this at all. Too complicated and very tiresome having to go through each individual employee. There is to much information and staff do not need to have this on their timesheets.

Please try to think up an easier solution

[Jane_Aspire]

This has caused a few problems with my client.  They use "staff purchases" and each employee is having a regular amount deducted depending on what they owe.  As the amount of the deduction is different we have had to set up an individual Pay Code for each staff member.  

It would great to be able to link the pay codes with gl codes.

[OliviaN]

I so agree with Jane on the need to be able to link pay codes with appropriate GL codes - this would be so useful for management reporting.