Assisting You to Interpret Your Reports – Payroll Register Explained
This is our third instalment of the guide, we hope this will aid you in understanding the payroll reports and enable you to obtain the most information possible from them.
It is important to note that the company used to generate these reports is fictitious and purely a test company so some of the figures in the reports will appear to be incorrect. Please disregard the actual figures in the guide; it is the format of the reports that is important.
Our aim is for you to become more familiar with them.
“Payroll Register”
The Payroll Register gives the payment details for each individual employee for the pay period.
A) Company name, pay group or frequency, pay run type (main or manual), and period end date
B) Printing date and time stamp
C) Employee details – tax code, IRD number, salary
D) Payment details & summary – includes ordinary pay (number of hours @ pay rate), leave (annual, sick, alternative, etc), allowances (bonus, commission, etc), deductions (union fee, medical insurance, etc)
E) Tax payments – PAYE, student loan, and child support
F) Direct Credit Balance – final amount to be paid into employee’s bank account
G) Payment Summary – hours split into Ordinary and Overtime, Gross Taxable (including payments for hours, leave, allowances), PAYE, and Direct Credit
This report can be sorted by employee surname (default) or employee code. It can be grouped and filtered by costing (division, cost centre, or department), and with page breaks between costings, if required.
Vero Insurance
Vero Insurance, New Zealand’s only World Class General Insurer, recently migrated on to DataPay and DataESS, Datacom’s most advanced payroll software system.
Vero consists of several specialist insurance companies with over 900 staff in 14 locations throughout
At Vero, payroll efficiency is of utmost importance given the large number of employees across different locations. By adopting Datacom’s ability to process 1,300 employees’ per pay clerk, Vero uses DataPay to handle their complex payroll needs in conjunction with changes in tax rules and other legislative obligations.
With Microsoft as the base technology and a calculation/rules-based structure, DataPay gives Vero the power to create an unlimited number of specialised payments scenarios and flexible work patterns to ease the workload for their HR and Payroll Department. DataESS a complementary software to DataPay and has put an end to many manual processes at Vero. With 24/7 electronic access, employees are now empowered to update their personal details, view their live payroll information and check leave balances, leave history and leave applications - all with zero paperwork. This enables Vero to concentrate on real business matters and focus on engaging their employees to produce a positive workplace climate.
Vero has ranked within the top five ‘Large Workplaces’ in the independent nationwide JRA ‘Best Workplaces’ survey every year since 2004. To find out more about Vero, visit: http://www.vero.co.nz/
Annual Wage and Salary Rise Slowest in Nine Years
Salary and wage rates as measured by the labour cost index (LCI) rose just 1.5 per cent in the year to the March quarter, the slowest rise in more than nine years.
Figures released by Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) today show public sector salary and wage rates, which include overtime, rising 2.3 per cent, while in the private sector the increase was 1.3 per cent. Economists are now waiting for the important Household Labour Force Survey due out on Thursday, which will confirm whether or not job growth has taken place over the past few months.
In the March quarter, salary and wage rates, including overtime, grew 0.3 per cent, with the public sector up 0.5 per cent and private sector up 0.3 per cent. The annual 1.5 per cent rise in the LCI was the lowest since the year to September 2000. It was a continuation of the steady decline in the growth of salary and wage rates, including overtime, from a peak of 4 per cent in the year to September 2008, the highest annual rise since the series started in 1992, SNZ said. The Quarterly Employment Survey (QES), also published today, showed average total hourly earnings increased 2.1 per cent for the year to the March 2010 quarter, down from a 3.7 per cent increase recorded for the year to the December quarter.
ASB Bank economist Nick Tuffley said today’s labour stats reflected “the lingering effects of the recession with a continued deceleration in wage inflation.” While the 1.5 per cent increase in annual wage inflation was the lowest since September 2000, the recovery in employment and hours paid was “encouraging and points to an improving labour market as firms look to increase output in response to improving demand.”
Thursday’s Household Labour Force survey was expected to show a recovery in employment over the first quarter, as the improvement in hiring intentions in business surveys late last year flowed through to actual activity. Tuffley said he expected to see a 0.3 per cent increase in employment, with the unemployment rate falling to 7.1 per cent (from 7.3 per cent previously). “Today’s results alone would be unlikely to strongly sway the RBNZ either way toward a June or July OCR hike. Subdued income growth continues to weigh on consumer confidence, with the majority of households noting they remain worse off relative to year ago in confidence surveys.
This is likely to have played a part in the patchiness of activity data in the household sector in recent months, particularly retail sales,” said Tuffley. “However, indicators of employment strongly suggest the labour market has turned and the Reserve Bank can be increasingly confident of the underlying economic recovery taking place,” he said. “This paves the way for monetary policy tightening to commence and the Reserve Bank has stated in its statement last week that this would occur “over the coming months”. Senior economist at UBS NZ, Robin Clements, said “the general thinking by most is that the labour market is near a turning point.” Confirmation of this would wait until the first quarter Household Labour Force Survey due this Thursday. Clements said ‘his read’ of today’s wage data was that it “reinforces the likelihood of a June start by the Reserve Bank to removing monetary stimulus.”
The latest annual increase in average total hourly earnings was the lowest since the year to the December 2004 quarter, SNZ said. The QES results also showed that seasonally adjusted gross earnings increased 2 per cent for the year to the March 2010 quarter, while the seasonally adjusted total paid hours fell 0.1 per cent, and full-time equivalent employees fell 0.5 per cent to 1.31m. For just the March quarter, compared to the three months to December, seasonally adjusted total paid hours were up 1.1 per cent, and total gross earnings up 0.7 per cent, while full time equivalent employees were 0.1 per cent lower. The QES showed that the recent period of decline in labour demand had abated, SNZ said. Filled jobs were up 0.1 per cent compared to a year earlier at 1.67m, as a 3.2 per cent rise in part time employment negated a 1.2 per cent fall in full time work.
In the March quarter, filled jobs were down 0.9 per cent, as part time employment fell 4.5 per cent due mainly to the seasonal fall in the education and training industry. The LCI measures changes in pay rates for a fixed quantity and quality of labour, while the QES is designed to measure quarterly estimates of change in, and levels of, average hourly and average weekly pre-tax earnings, average weekly paid hours, and the number of filled jobs. In the year to March the education industry had the biggest rise in salary and wage rates, including overtime, lifting 3.2 per cent, followed by health and community services with a 2.6 per cent gain, according to the LCI. In the March quarter, manufacturing of non-metallic mineral products, and of transport equipment, machinery and equipment had the largest increases, with gains of 0.6 per cent.
- NZPA
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10642677&pnum=0
Report Builder
Do you find keeping track of public holidays for different parts of the country a grinding chore?
Datacom has added a new feature in the report builder. The ability to report on public holiday region has been included in the “Employee Field” list. You can now run a single report for the entire company without the hassle of running separate reports for separate regions and keeping track of those holidays.
The dates have been integrated into the system and with a single click of a button the system generates the report for you. You can then print off the report and/or you also could export it out on to Excel. All there is to do is just to design your report in a structure that you like and leave the rest to the click of the button.
To sneak a peek at the new DataPay Video click below: