payroll FAQ’s

This release of Payroll addresses issues which arose from the March 2009 version as follows:

• Employees with an S tax code were unable to join KiwiSaver, and employees that had previously been enrolled in KiwiSaver were removed if their tax code was changed to S. This has been resolved.
• The tax rate for the NSW tax code has been changed to 16.7% (consisting of 15% PAYE and 1.7% ACC Earner Premium). Due to an error in the specification supplied by the IRD, this rate was incorrectly set to 18.7% in the initial 2009.1 release.
• The IRD Schedule report always displayed “Year Ended 31/03/10”, regardless of the actual year is was generated for. The correct Year End date is now displayed.
• Performance improvements have been made to speed up the operation of the system.
• When running IR-filing for multiple payrolls, files for all databases were created, regardless of which payroll files were actually chosen. This has been resolved.
• Monthly employees with 1% Compulsory Employer Contributions were not being updated to 2% for pays rolling into May. This has been resolved..
• The ME SL tax code was being output to the EMS as “MESL”, which was not accepted by the IRD. This tax code now outputs correctly as “ME SL”. All other SL tax codes retain a space in between the initial code and “SL”, in accordance with IRD specifications.
• If employees were changed to the ME or ME SL tax code prior to April 2009, IR348s for March 2009 were rejected. This issue has been resolved by the IRD.
• The menu option Help > MYOB on the Web > Check for Product Update has been removed, as this option is now redundant. The Help > Upgrade Software Online option has been renamed to Check for Product Updates.

MYOB Payroll now seemlessly (magically) sends a .txt file through to MYOB Accounting/Plus/Premier every time you finalise a pay.  Integrating takes a bit of painstaking work to get right but REALLY WORTH THE EFFORT!

Integration saves a lot of manual entering and both accounting and payroll agree for evermore (assuming you actually pay people exactly what Payroll calculates).

If your not confident, get some help to set up integration from an MYOB Certified Consultant who has plenty of experience. The trick is linking Pay codes and/or cost centres to the correct general ledger accounts.

Having set up the linking, TEST to see that the journal is giving you the desired result. If not then go back to Payroll and do some more tweeking. I do it by creating a test pay for one person with all the deductions and allowances available (including having an employee who is a KiwiSaver member). Take a backup to the desktop BEFORE you finalise the pay, then check the journal in MYOB Accounting. You can restore your payroll and then delete the journal entry in accounting once testing is complete.

At this point of time, MYOB’s support note is incorrect so do not follow it. I’ve alerted them to the fact and hopefully this will be rectified soon.

PS Where does the KiwiSaver Employer Contribution of 2% go? It codes to your usual 6-XXXX Wages  & Salaries account but the amounts are obvious so you can journal the amounts to 6-XXXX Superannuation at a later date.

Happy integration!

Lynley#adp01

Question: I have just started with the MYOB Payroll software. I have a question just in regards to the backing up of the payroll file.

I have saved them (backed up) onto a flash stick  (I also saved it onto my C drive). However when I went to open them up I couldn’t read them. It was a whole lot of gibberish! Other than the backing up I do, does the MYOB software store copies on my Hardware also? Also I have a password to open up the MYOB package, would that have anything to do with the fact that I cannot read the save timesheets etc.
Please advise.

Answer: Just as with MYOB Accounting, a backup in MYOB Payroll is a compressed, or zipped, file. You cannot open this file as it is; it needs to be restored before the information can be read.

Care needs to be taken when restoring a Payroll backup. It will overwrite your current file, so if you want to get back to how things are currently, be sure to have a backup of that current file.

To restore the backup, go into MYOB Payroll, and select Restore from the File menu at the top of the screen. Point it towards the backup you wish to restore. You will be warned that the restored data will overwrite the current data.#adp01

You can view employees pay history and reprint past payslips.  From Maintain Employees section, select the Pay History tab.

To reprint a previous payslip, double click on the payslip concerned. It will open.

At this point the payslip may be printed or emailed.

#adp01