Payroll

Pays and Pay Runs

Saasu is a comprehensive payroll system for micro to small businesses. It’s designed and manages companies with up to 500 employees. Currently our Payroll module is designed for Australia but is modified and used in other countries as long as you accept the limits to Saasu payroll in those countries.

Payroll Methods

Payroll is managed in two ways:

• As individual Payroll transactions – The employee details are set up from the main menu by selecting View > Employees and then clicking Add. A Payroll transaction can then be created by selecting Add > Payroll.
• As Pay Runs using Pay Groups – A Pay Group needs to be created. Employees can then be added to the Pay group from their Employee Details screen by selecting View > Employees.

Pay Items

Pay items are the components that make up a person’s pay. These parts include tax, take home pay, health benefits, pension amounts, union payments, etc.

The Pay Item list screen shows you a list of the default pay items you get when you sign up for Saasu. You can add and remove from this list but bear in mind that certain pay items will be required for each zone in order to generate the correct payslips and required tax teports.

Custom pay items

Saasu allows you to set up custom pay items for things such as custom overtime rate, uniform allowances, car, and travel allowances.

You can set up custom pay items in Saasu and use these in your payroll transactions.

Things to watch out for when setting up custom pay items:

1. Is the pay item taxable? For example, depending on the jurisdiction of the country that you’re operating in, deductions such as Salary Sacrifice Super or Charity are not taxable.
2. What tax code should you use for this pay item?
3. Do you want to include this pay item when calculating certain entitlements or employer contributions? In some cases, you may want to exclude certain wage and salary components when calculating particular entitlements and employer contributions.

NOTE: We cannot provide any advice on the questions mentioned above because we’re not a licensed tax adviser and the answers normally vary depending on your particular situation and zone/jurisdiction. If in doubt, please check with your adviser.

To set up custom pay items, select Settings > Payroll > Manage Pay Items. Once you have set these up, you can use them in the default pay and in your payroll transactions.

Exclude Pay Items from the Calculation of other Pay Items

Examples:

1. You have just set up a uniform allowance wage and salary Pay Item and you want to exclude this from Employer Contribution > SGC Super calculation, which is calculated as 9% of gross pay.
2. You have just set up a custom overtime rate (eg Overtime 1.25x) and any overtime that falls in this category must be excluded from leave entitlements and SGC Super.

To exclude these pay items:

1. Select Settings > Payroll > Manage Pay Items.
2. Open each of the pay items you want to apply exclusions to. (In the example above, Employer Contribution > SGC Super, Entitlement > Annual Holiday Leave, Entitlement > Personal Sick Leave).
3. Click Exclusions when the pay item is open.
4. Tick the pay items that you want to exclude. (In the example above, they would be Uniform Allowance and Overtime 1.25x).
5. Click OK to close the dialog.
6. Click Save.

Tracking Pay Item Thresholds and Limits?

Currently Saasu doesn’t support threshold calculations (upper or lower) for various types of pay items that relate to pensions, superannuation, and other benefits. We plan to add this capability in the future.

If you have thresholds or limits like this, you can monitor these manually via a spreadsheet. Alternatively, you can add them in as the thresholds are met (instead of removing them later date if the thresholds aren’t met). There are several methods depending on the rules and requirements for your specific zone. We may not cover them all in the following examples.

There are several ways to handle thresholds and limits depending on your preference and procedures. Consult your accounting adviser if you aren’t sure which method is best for your particular situation.

NOTE: To reverse a pay item amount, you add the pay item but include the amount as a negative number.

Here are some candidate methods for handling thresholds and limits:

• Remove the pay item from Pays until the final pay for the threshold calculation period.
• Reverse the amount in the final pay for the threshold calculation period where the threshold isn’t met.
• Reverse the amount in the first pay of the next threshold calculation period that relates to the accrual for the previous threshold calculation period where the threshold wasn’t met.
• Add an adjusting pay by creating a pay for that employee with just that one pay item reversing the amount. Remove all the $0 or unused pay items before saving the transaction.
• Do your adjustments in bulk at the end of each quarter or year. (This may not be possible depending on the laws and regulations that pertain to the threshold or limits). You would need to do this using an adjusting pay or within a normal pay as a special pay item added in.

Pay Items dependent on other Pay Items

Some Pay Items like superannuation, pensions, or health care may need to use other Pay Items in order to calculate. A common example is pension or superannuation payments that relate to a percentage of Wages and Salary Pay Items. Ensure you don’t include the selected Pay items in these calculations if you don’t want to – To see the exclusions for a pay item:

1. Click Payroll in the main menu.
2. Click Setup Pay Items.
3. Click the edit (pencil) icon to access the Employer Contribution pay item.
4. Click the Exclusions link to access the list of pay items that are available for exclusion in the pay item’s calculation (those ticked are excluded).

Emailing Payslips

See the Templates Guide for detailed instructions on creating or modifying the Payslip Template used to print and send Payslips, .

Superannuation

Superannuation Payable

You may want to know details of Super/Pension accruals or withheld from employee pays within a certain date period so you can pay or report these to creditors.

To view employee super payable:

1. Select Reports > Payroll > Pay Items Summary.
2. Specify the date range and select the pay item from the pick list – Eg: Employer Contribution: SGC Super
3. Click Show.

Entering Employee Fund Details

To enter employee super fund details:

1. Select Employee > Default Pay.
2. Click the icon beside the Super pay item.

Bulk Processing Payments to Funds

For larger organisations with lots of employees you may need to process lots of payments to different superannuation or pensions. For ease of processing you would add each quarterly super fund payment as an Automated Purchase.

1. Automating your Transactions for making Payments each Month or Quarter:
   1. Go to Automate > Purchases.
   2. Enter the Purchase by choosing the contact to be the fund name. Set the account allocation to be Liability: Super or Pension Payable account (the name of this account varies for your tax zone).
   3. Set the frequency to be every 3 months on the date you wish to process.
   4. Tick requires follow-up. This is the prompt to adjust amounts each period if the staff are variable hours/pay.
   5. Add a tag to the transaction such as Super, Pension or similar.
   6. Don’t set the transaction as payment applied as it won’t be paid the date the engine creates the transaction.
2. When you are ready to pay the SGC Super you can process payments to funds in Bulk:
   1. Go to Purchases and filter for these payables using the Tag you used above (click more filters to do this in this screen).
   2. Tick all the ones you wish to pay and then click Pay at the top of the list. You will be taken to a payment screen to verify the list of super companies being paid.
   3. Save the payment and an ABA file ready for upload into bank will be available at the top of the screen.
   4. Upload this file to online banking.

Entitlements

Entering Leave

Consider the example below where an employee works 173 hours per pay period. Usually when you do a payroll entry for this employee, the payroll screen would show 173 hours for their Base Pay. If this employee takes 20 hours of Annual Leave and you want to enter this in their next payroll:

1. Deduct the 20 hours from the total hours for the pay period – The total number of hours worked will be 153.
2. Add a new Wages and Salary pay item.
3. Select Annual Leave Pay from the pick list.
4. Enter 20 into the Hours field – The amount will be calculated automatically.
5. Click the comment icon beside the leave pay item to add notes relating to the dates and times leave was taken. (Alternatively you can create an entry in Timesheets entitled Leave for this employee. To do this, select View > Timesheets > Add link.)

Your screen should now look like the one captured in this screenshot:

Entitlements not calculating

If you find that entitlements are not calculated for an employee when you do a payroll entry, the most common reason behind this is that the number of hours have not been set for the employee’s base pay item (wages and salary). The following example demonstrates an employee whose entitlements will calculate automatically:

1. To see this screen in your file, select View > Employee.
2. Open the Employee Details screen with the pencil icon – You will be in the Main tab area.
3. You may expect the number of hours for the pay period you have entered under Employment Detailsabove to be taken into account when calculating the entitlements, but this is not the case. You need to set the number of hours for the base pay item either in default pay or when you are doing the payroll entry, as shown below.
4. The next time you do a payroll entry for the employee, you will see that the entitlements have been automatically calculated, as demonstrated in the screenshot below:

Entitlement Accrual Rates Default

Saasu has calculators attached to pay items. These are used to work out the hours of entitlement accrual for holiday, sick, and other types of leave for employee pay transactions. The default setting is 10 days for Personal Sick Leave and 20 days for Annual Holiday Leave. Modifying these percentage rates doesn’t alter historical transactions.

Setting Leave Accrual

To modify the leave entitlement accrual (in hours) generated for each pay transaction:

1. Select View > Payroll > Setup Pay Items.
2. Open the pay item.
3. Modify the percentage rate as required.

Setting Percentages to use for Leave Accrual

Because holiday and sick leave differ depending on your agreement/contract/award/country, etc, Saasu only has a default accrual set for Entitlement pay items. This default percentage of hours needs to be set according to your specific needs. The default accruals for the Holiday Leavepay item is set to 4 weeks (20 days) per annum, 7.6923% of gross hours worked. The percentage is calculated as follows:

(4 weeks x 5 days x 8 hours) / (52 weeks x 5 days x 8 hours ) = 4 / 52 = 7.6923%

Sick leave is managed in the same way.

How do I know how many days leave my employees are entitled to?

Seek guidance from your advisors as the rules differ for different businesses and zones. Several legal, regulatory, and other issues should be considered.

I’ve been accruing leave at the wrong rate, what can I do to fix this?

You will need to do an adjusting entry in the employee’s next pay transaction. You can do this by adding an extra pay item under the Next Pay tab for the employee:

1. Select View > Employees from the main menu.
2. Click the Next Pay icon (pencil with arrow).
3. Add the entitlement you need to make an adjustment for (in addition to the normal ones that accrue).
4. Ensure Auto-calc is NOT ticked – It should be off for the extra pay item you are adding for this pay.
5. Work out how many extra (or less) hours they should have and enter this.

Can I set an expiry on accrued leave?

Currently we don’t have a mechanism for removing expired accruals. You would need to put through a zero dollar adjusting payroll entry for that person to remove the accrued leave which no longer applies. To do this:

1. Remove all pay items except the accrual one needed.
2. Set this accrual to the negative amount you need to adjust it by.
3. Save the transaction.

How do I track the accrued value of leave in my accounts?

This would be captured with an accrual journal each month/quarter/year. Where your employees are entitled to leave at current (rather than historical) pay rates, you would need to allow for this changing the accrued total value over time with additional journal adjustments. Contact your advisor regarding specific requirements in this area.

Long Service Leave

You may have employees who are entitled or contracted to start accruing long service leave hours. This help item explains how to setup a Pay Iteam to facilitate this.

Accruing Long Service Leave:

1. Go to Settings > Payroll > Manage Pay Items.
2. Open and duplicate one of the Entitlement Pay Items.
3. Give it a new name such as Long Service Leave or similar.
4. Work out the % of Gross Hours you need to accrue each pay period.
5. Set it’s accrual rate according to this percentage.
6. Save and close the screen.

You can now add this Pay Item to employee’s default pay as it becomes an entitlement for them.

Paying Long Service Leave:

1. Go to Settings > Payroll > Manage Pay Items.
2. Open and duplicate one of the Wages and Salaries leave Pay Items.
3. Give it a new name such as Long Service Leave Pay or similar.
4. Apply the appropriate account code and tax code for your tax zone.
5. Save and close the screen.

You can now add this Pay Item to employee’s pay as they take leave.

Hourly Rates

There are two ways to set hourly rates for employees in Saasu:

1. Set the individual employee hourly rates using the Employees Details screen.

These rates are used in payroll transactions when the Hourly Ratepay item is set to be the product of a multiplier and the regular hourly rate (eg: 1 x regular hourly rate from the Employee Details screen).

2. Set up hourly rate using an hourly rate pay item.

In the Pay Item screen you can set up your pay item to use a fixed hourly rate for all employees using this pay item. Importantly, the Employee Details screen hourly rate is ignored if one already exists when you use this pay item.

My employee’s hourly pay rates have changed but new pays don’t show the change – Why is this?

Here are some possible causes:

• If you are tracking pays via a pay item hourly rate, then this needs to be updated. Just updating the Employees Details screen won’t affect the pay item because several employees might use the same pay item in payroll transactions.
• If you are tracking pays using the hourly rate in the Employees Detailsscreens, ensure your pay item (eg Base pay Hourly) is set to an hourly rate such as 1 x regular hourly rate. From the Setup Pay Items screen, click the Base Pay Hourly pencil icon to edit this.
• Duplicating old pays and just changing the hours will carry over old pay rate details. You need to create the payroll transactions afresh using the Add Payrollscreen and selecting the employee from the dropdown list.
• If you are using a pay item that takes hours from timesheets, ensure the pay item has had its rate updated. Alternatively, if you are relying on the hourly rate in the individual Employees Details screens, you can have this set to Hourly and 1 x regular hourly rate. You can also update the fixed hourly rate ifyou are using this option.

Salary Packages

There are several situations where you may need to create payroll transactions for particular Salary Packages, Enterprise Agreements, Employment Contracts, Salary Packages, and more. In Saasu, pay items help you create a Salary Package. Before doing this you need to know the accounting treatment for the Salary Package components. We recommend you consult an advisor to:

1. Establish what the accounting entry looks like.
2. Set up the required pay items in Saasu (if they don’t already exist) against the employee default pay.

How does Saasu calculate tax when multiple pay items are used?

Wage and Salary and Deductionpay items are taxable. Saasu will calculate tax on the sum of the pay items set as Taxable. To change or check the tax status of pay items:

1. Select Settings > Payroll > Manage Pay Items.
2. Tick or untick  the taxablecheckbox as required.

How will the various components of a salary package be displayed on a payslip?

In a payslip, pay items will always display separately. As you add new and additional pay items to a salary package, these will display separately so the employee receives the detail comprising their payment(s).

Business-related Expenses

Some employers adopt an approach of paying business-related expenses to staff through their payroll transactions. Before adopting this approach, please refer to your adviser regarding the suitability of payments to employees where tax isn’t being withheld from payments on business-related expenses.

The following example is a Paytransaction where the employee gets paid for business-related expenses in their pay that the employer has decided aren’t taxable. In Saasu, you can create your own pay items, set these if they are taxable, and decide whether to exclude them from other pay items that rely on calculations for tax, pensions, or superannuation.

Note: Depending on your accountant’s advice, you may prefer to run the Expenses-Related pay item as a Wages and Salaries pay item.

1. Set up a pay item for the expenses by selecting Settings > Payroll > Manage Pay Items.
2. Click the Wages and Salaries link to load and create the pay item.
3. Set up the employee’s default pay to include the expenses. Note that the tax setting is turned off because in this example these are business-related expenses where you are advised by your accountant not to withhold tax on this portion of the pay. Additionally, when you set up the pay item above you may have set it to nontaxableby default.
4. 

Details in a Payslip Won’t Update

When you create a payroll transaction it takes the details from the Employee Details screen. If you later change these details, that change won’t flow through to previously-created payroll transactions. In summary, the Employee Details screen (under Settings > Payroll > Employees) has default information for creating NEW payroll transactions while the Payroll Transaction screen has specific information for that particular payroll transaction.

Consequently, if you want NEW payroll transactions created to show changes, you will need to update the Employee Details screen.

How do I change a pay transaction that has an incorrect bank account/employment details?

You need to go to the actual payroll transaction and use the two links listed below. You will find these just above the list of pay items:

• Employee Bank Details for this transaction
• Employment Details for this transaction

Why do you treat these transactions differently?

If we allowed users to change the default settings, this would flow through to all payroll transactions for those employees and you would lose historical bank account information.

Changing Employee Entitlements to Hours

If you have accidentally entered employee entitlements (i.e Annual Holiday Leave, Personal Sick Leave) in days rather than hours, follow these steps to make the necessary corrections:

1. Select View > Payroll to access the payroll list screen.
2. Select the employee from the employee list.
3. Set the date range with the start date going way back to the employee start date (or even before that) and the end date being today (or any future date).
4. Click Show – This will load all payroll entries for that particular employee.
5. Locate the very first payroll entry (this is the very first one at the bottom) > Click the pencil icon.
6. Under entitlements, if Auto Calc is ticked for both Annual Holiday Leave and Personal Sick Leave, untick these checkboxes.
7. Manually calculate the annual holiday and personal sick leave in hours, based on the number of work hours per day for that employee (i.e. Number of Annual Holiday Leave days * Number of work hours per day).
8. Enter the calculated hours in the Annual Holiday Leave and Personal Sick Leave fields.
9. Click Save And Close – This will change the annual holiday and personal sick leave entitlements back to hours for that employee.

Time in Lieu Tracking

Currently Saasu doesn’t provide a dedicated method for this requirement. In the mean time, you can create pay items to track this. From Settings > Payroll > Manage Pay Items, you can create new Entitlement and Wage and Salary pay items for accruing and taking this type of leave in lieu.

Note: You can open existing pay items and duplicate these to accelerate the setup process. This also helps ensure you use the correct W tax codes for these pay items (these will be used in PAYG reporting).

Entering Payroll if you use a Payroll Service

Despite having a payroll company, you may still want to keep a record of your periodic pay runs so that your file is complete:

1. Create a new journal entry that will represent this pay run cycle – This is a bulk entry for all employees. Each item in the journal entry will represent cashflow for a bank account or the amount to allocate against an account.
2. Save the transaction.
3. When you do the next pay run, find the previous Pay Runs journal entry and duplicate it.
4. Modify the pay item amounts for any differences.
5. Save and close.

Payroll Year – Extra Pay Period

Due to a quirk in the calendar that relates to leap years, employees paid weekly may receive an extra pay in a given year. The effect is that an employee receives 53 pays (weekly) or 27 pays (fortnightly). This doesn’t affect monthly employees.

Customers sometimes ask us whether to calculate benefits based on the 27 and 53 pay periods instead in this situation. We decided not to handle this automatically because:

(a) The majority of businesses don’t adjust their process for these circumstances.

(b) We have accepted a general legal understanding that each pay period stands by itself. That is, the concept of an annual package or salary amount has evolved in business thinking rather than tax authority and government legislation.

If a business decided to reduce their staff payroll each period to allow for this extra pay in a payroll year, they would no doubt need to notify employees prior to that payroll year. They would also adjust accrual rates in Saasu pay items (eg Annual Leave Accruals and Sick Leave Accruals).

Accordingly, Saasu doesn’t provide a mechanism or feature to handle this automatically. If your organization decides to adopt a lower pay per pay period approach for these years, you will need to make these adjustments manually on the Pay Items and Employee Details screens.

Opening Balances for Payroll

1. Select Add > Payroll from the main menu.
2. Enter the date to be the start/changeover date for your file.
3. Select the employee from the Employee pick list.
4. Ensure Auto Calc is NOT ticked for the Wages and Salary, Deductions, Tax Withheld and Employer Contributions pay items.
5. Manually enter the figures from the previous accounting system into the fields for each of these pay items.
6. Similarly, ensure Auto Calc is NOT ticked for the Entitlements pay items.
7. Enter the number of hours from the previous accounting system into the fields for each of the Entitlements.
8. Click Save and Close.
9. Repeat the above process for all employees.

If you are entering opening balances for accounts via the Setup Opening Balances screen, you may want to run the General Ledger Detail report to see the postings for these payroll entries and make adjustments to your Asset, Expense and Liabilityopening balance entries accordingly.

Opening Balances for Entitlements

When you move to Saasu from your old accounting system you may wish to capture historical accrued leave. This help note covers this scenario.

1. Select Add > Payrollfrom the main menu.
2. Enter the date as the start/changeover date for your file.
3. Select the employee from the Employee pick list.
4. Remove any default pay items for Wages and Salary, Deductions and Tax Withheld that are already set for the particular employee.
5. Ensure Auto Calc is NOT ticked for the Entitlements pay items.
6. Enter the number of hours from the previous accounting system into the fields for each of the entitlements.
7. Click Save and Close.
8. Repeat this process for all the employees.

Entering SGC Payments

When you enter a payroll transaction that contains an SGC (Superannuation Guarantee Contribution) super amount, Saasu puts the money owed to the employee’s super company against a Liability: Employee SGC Super Payableaccount. We do this because the employer now owes the employee this SGC super (in the form of a liability) to the employee’s nominated super company. At the same time, Saasu puts the same amount of money against the Expense: Employee SGC Super account. We do this because the employer has incurred an expense (despite not having paid for it yet).

When you make a payment to the employee’s superannuation fund, you need to clear the Liability: Employee SGC Super Payable account by selecting it when you choose the account for that purchase invoice or journal entry. The effect of doing this clears away the Liability account.

If these payroll accounts are not visible in your pick list, select Settings > Account Listand tick Payroll Accounts to make them visible.

You will also need to store super account information for Fairwork reforms requirements. There are two steps to this process:

1. Create a contact for each super company payment destination.IMPORTANT: This is typically a payment destination so you may have multiple contacts within one Superannuation Company (eg AMP Super or AMP Life).
2. Enter the specific employee data against that contact:
   1. The comment icon next to a pay item is where you store the data. To find this, select View >Employees.
   2. Click the pencil icon to open up the employee.
   3. Choose the Default Pay tab.
   4. In the Employer Contributions section you will see/add SGC Super as an example.
   5. Click the comment icon beside the pay item dropdown.

There is also a comment icon in specific payroll transactions beside that pay item. However, what you enter there only applies to that particular transaction. This is so we can track changing or custom/one-off super account details per pay transaction over time for workchoice compliance reasons.

How do I enter Super Payable transactions?

Payments are typically handled in two ways:

1. You create a purchase for each super company with each line item representing the SGC payable for each employee. The down side of this approach is that it’s harder to do a year end SGC super payments reconciliation per employee. You can only do this at Super Fund level.
2. You create a purchase per employee to each super company. When they make payments to the super company, they apply a payment to multiple purchases at once.

You can use a tag such as SGC for these transactions. This makes it easier to list the transactions in reports and lists for payment processing and super account reconciliation. For both methods described above, a fast way to do this is to duplicate the previous transactions for super for the previous pay cycle and amend the amounts/summaryfield for the new pay period. Alternatively, you can batch them up into reporting period frequency for your super company (i.e. 4 weekly SGC payables into one-monthly purchase with payment).

What account allocations do I use?

Typically the Liability: Employee SGC Super Payable account would be selected in these purchases. This account typically builds up as payroll transactions are created with the SGC Employer Contribution pay item in them.

How do I apply payment to these purchases?

You can use two methods to do this:

1. If you want to process these using a Direct Entry (ABA) file, you can tick the ones you need to pay from the Purchaselist screen (click Purchases in the main menu and filter for unpaid purchases). You can then click the Pay link above the list to access the Payment screen. Once you save this screen, a file used in online banking to process all the payments for those purchases becomes available. Note that for the the Direct Entry file to work in online banking, each contact/fund needs to have their bank details added to their record in their Contact details screen.
2. Alternatively, you can apply one payment at a time as you pay each fund separately by cheque (check) or via online banking.

Exclude Deductions from PAYG Payment Summary

Certain Deduction pay items may need to be excluded from the gross payments reported in the PAYG payment summary for an employee. Mapping a Deduction pay item to the Gross Payments field removes it from Gross Payments (the deduction being a mathematical subtraction).

To exclude Deductions pay items from Gross Payments:

1. Click Reports in the main menu.
2. Click Income Tax Payers Summary in the report list.
3. Select the appropriate reporting method and financial year.
4. Click Next.
5. When you are in the mappings screen, select Gross Payments from the pick list for the particular Deduction Pay item you want excluded from gross payments.

If you map a Deduction pay item to the Deductions or Workplace Giving summary fields (rather than Gross Payments), the YTD amount for the pay item will display under additional details in the PAYG Payment Summary as specified by the ATO. If you map it to Gross Payments, it’s YTD amount will be deducted from the gross payments.

Saasu saves your mappings every time you click Next in the Mappings screen. If you realize your PAYG payment summaries are incorrect, late, or lost, visit the ATO help page for further instructions.

Non-Deductible Allowance and Expense

Allowances or expenses paid to cover non-deductible items for an employee can be items such as normal home-to-work transport expenses. Verify with your Taxation Advisor what is deductible and non-deductible for your specific circumstance. When adding a Payroll transaction, there is a section called Other Pay Types. In this section, you will find Non-Deductible Allowance & Expense.

For example, you want to deduct $200/month from an employee’s salary to pay for their motor vehicle lease. The vehicle is owned by the employee and isn’t being used for work purposes in this situation (or if it is, the employee may be claiming a tax deduction for the work use portion themselves in their own tax return).

Before the employee had the vehicle:

$2000	Base Pay
$2000	Gross Pay (i.e. pay before tax)
$260	Less Tax Withheld (PAYG withholding tax)
$1740	Net Pay After Tax

After the employee had the vehicle:

$1800	Base Pay
$200	Non-deductible Allowance & Expense
$2000	Gross Pay (i.e. pay before tax)
$260	Less Tax Withheld (PAYG withholding tax)
$1740	Net Pay After Tax

Novated Leases

1. Set up a Liability Account called Liability: Novated Lease Agreement.
2. Enter a pay transaction including a pay item for the amount of the novated lease which should be deducted from the gross pay:
3. Enter a journal for the net salary amount of the novated lease:
4. Enter a purchase for the full amount with the novated lease company. In this example, $1,514.33 which is coded to the Liability: Novated Lease Agreement account.

Split Pay

To split a pay in Saasupost the payment to a clearing bank account (eg set up a bank account called Asset: Payroll Clearing). Then the pay should be posted to that account (which credits that account) and it can then be split with a journal to the two separate bank accounts. For example:

Account	Debit	Credit
Asset: Payroll Clearing	$100
Asset: Bank Account ABC		$50
Asset: Bank Account XYZ		$50

Pay Runs using Timesheets

If you use pay groups, you can use timesheets data to produce employee payroll transactions automatically. If you don’t have multiple employees, you can still use this feature by setting up a pay group and adding just one employee to it for processing a pay run.

1. Select View > Payroll > Setup Pay Item.
2. Add a new Wages and Salary pay item called Base Pay Hourly from Timesheet (for example).
3. Tick Auto-fill hours from timesheet when creating payroll entry.
4. Apply this new pay item to each employee where you wish to use timesheet data in Saasu to generate their pay transaction – When you do a pay run for the pay group it will take the timesheets from the pay period date range.

Pay Run Adjustments

Sometimes you may have approved a pay run and then realize you made a mistake and need to make some adjustments. For example, you may have entered 40 hours in the Base Pay Hourly field and then realized it should have been 32 hours because the 8 hours were taken as annual leave. Saasu doesn’t allow you to edit the payroll entry directly because it is part of a pay run. However, there are two ways to deal with this situation:

1. Delete and redo the pay run. If you do this, you may need to re-enter any adjustments to the next pays.
   1. Select View > Pay Run.
   2. Delete the pay run.
   3. If you just want to recreate the transactions but don’t want the emails to go out again to all employees, disable auto-email first by going into the pay group and unticking Email Payslips.
   4. Save your changes.
   5. Make adjustments for this pay run in the next pay section by selecting View > Employeesand clicking the next pay icon beside the edit/pencil icon. Using example 1 above:
      • Change the hours in Base Pay Hourly field to 32.
      • Add a new line item in the wages and salary section using the plus icon.
      • Select Annual Leave Pay.
      • Enter 8 in the hours field.
      • Save the next pay.
   6. Once you’ve made the required changes, start the pay run again, check the drafts, and approve these once you have made sure everything is correct.
   7. You might want to re-enable the Email Payslips option if you disabled this before.
2. Create an adjustment entry. Using example 1 above:
   1. Add a new payroll entry by selecting Add > Payroll and ensure the entry has the same date as the pay run date.
   2. Use the dropdown field to select the employee.
   3. Remove all lines except Base Pay Hourly.
   4. Enter -8 hours in the Base Pay Hourly field.
   5. Add a new line in the Wages and Salary section using the plus icon and select Annual Leave Pay.
   6. Enter 8 in the hours field.
   7. Save the transaction.
   8. To email this adjustment to the employee, click the Email link after saving the transaction.

Change Pay Run Date

In Saasu we restrict changing the transaction date if the payroll entries are part of the pay run. Here are three possible ways to handle this situation:

• If you’re just trying to get the bank rec done and the dates don’t line up (eg out by 1 or 2 days) you could probably just tick the entries and move on.
• Rerun the pay run for that period. To do this:
  1. Delete the old pay run.
  2. Edit the pay group – Change the next pay run date and pay period, untick auto email payslip to employee, and save. (You probably don’t want to re-email the payslips).
  3. Start the pay run, check, and approve it.
  4. Once you’ve finished, go back to editing the pay group and check that the next pay run date and period are correct.
  5. Re-enable auto email payslip (if applicable).
• 1. Use the general journal to move the date.
  2. Move the money back into the bank account for the incorrect date.
  3. Move the money out again on the correct pay date.

  NOTE: You’ll need to set up a clearing account to do this. In the following example, the incorrect pay date is 14 May, and the correct one is 15 May.

  Journal entry 1: Moving the money back in, 14 May

  DEBIT Asset: Bank Account

  CREDIT Asset: Clearing Account

  Journal entry 2: Moving money out, 15 May, correct payment date

  DEBIT Asset: Clearing Account

  CREDIT Asset: Bank Account

Why can’t I change the date?

If we allow this, we lose the integrity and rigor of Group Payroll, which, in theory, should be final when it’s run. Companies with hundreds of staff use Saasu. Consequently, if we allow this change, it reduces the accounting compliance and integrity of Saasu payroll to below their standards. Several areas are impacted by a pay run, including the generation of bulk EFT files and leave/year end employee payment summaries. Additionally, if the emails have been sent to employees, it is good accounting practice to adjust entries rather than change and resend payslips. There are several other reasons for having this business rule in place in Saasu. These are just a few examples.