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Paying your employees > Creating payroll categories
An employee’s pay is made up of separate components, such as normal time, overtime, superannuation guarantee, salary sacrifice, PAYG withholding, and so on. In AccountRight, these components are called payroll categories, and they are grouped into six types: wages, superannuation, entitlements, deductions, expenses and taxes.
All monies paid to an employee for labour or services rendered on an hourly, salary or other basis.
Items such as holiday and sick leave, which employees accrue under the terms of their work agreement.
Amounts withheld by the employer and paid to other organisations on behalf of the employee, for example, union fees.
Employer expenses
Employer-paid benefits other than superannuation, for example, WorkCover.
Amounts withheld by the employer from the employee’s paycheque and paid to a statutory authority, for example, PAYG Withholding paid to the ATO.
A default list of payroll categories is generated when you create your company file. You may want to review these categories and tailor them to suit your business needs.
The ATO requires that some superannuation contributions that exceed the superannuation guarantee amount (for example, salary sacrifice and some salary packaged amounts), be reported on payment summaries.
Any reportable superannuation contributions need be set up as separate superannuation payroll categories.
To create a payroll category
1
Go to the Payroll command centre and click Payroll Categories. The Payroll Category List window appears.
You cannot create any tax categories. To view the tax table information, click the Taxes tab and then click the zoom arrow () next to PAYG Withholding. Tax table information is set by the ATO. Therefore, any queries should be referred to the ATO.
3
Click New. The Information window for the selected payroll category type appears.
5
Make the required selections for the payroll category. See the following topics for information about the options available for each payroll category type:
6
Click Employee. The Linked Employees window appears.
a Wage category, click Exempt and select the taxes and deductions that do not apply to the new category
a Superannuation category (and you have selected a percentage of gross wages as the calculation basis), click Exempt and exclude those wage categories that should not be included in the superannuation calculation
an Entitlement category (and you have selected a percentage of gross wages as the calculation basis), click Exempt and exclude those wage categories that should not be included in the entitlement calculation
a Deduction category, click Exempt and select the taxes that should be applied only to net pay (that is, to gross pay less the deduction amount)
an Employer Expense category (and you have selected a percentage of gross wages as the calculation basis), click Exempt and choose the wage categories that will not contribute to the value of the expense.
9
Click OK.
10
Click OK to return to the Payroll Category List window.

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