Processing Pays

Pay runs pass through several steps before completion; these are detailed below.

Note: The date for the pay run is based off the MYOB Advanced business date displayed at the top of all screens. This can be different from the actual date, to allow you to process past or future pays, but it must always be within the pay period that you're processing.

Creating Pays

Pays are created on the Manage Pays (MP.PP.41.10) form. A pay run is created for a specific pay group, which loads in the Standard Pays for all employees in the group.

Pays are created as a background process - large pays may take a long time to initialise, so by creating them in the background, you are not prevented from performing other activities. Once a pay has been successfully created, you can click on its entry on the Pay Run Details (MP.PP.31.20) form to edit it.

If an error occurs during the process of creating a pay, it will be created with the ERROR status. The pay cannot be processed further in this state, but it can be edited to correct the problems that caused the error state.

Processing Pays

The Pay Run Details form lists the pays of all employees included in the selected pay group. You can select any employee and click Edit Pay to view and edit their pay details on the Employee's Current Pay (MP.PP.31.30) form. Once you've made all the changes you need to, select Process from the Actions menu to process the pay. This sets all of the employees' pay records to read-only and the pay's status changes to PROCESSING.

Updating Pays

When a pay item or entitlement is edited, the system automatically updates all open Current Pays and Standard Pays that contain the affected pay item(s). (Editing an entitlement automatically updates all pay items related to the entitlement, and therefore any pays that contain those pay items.)

While an open pay is being updated, it is moved into the UPDATING status. Pays in this status cannot be edited until the update has been applied and the pay is returned to the OPEN status.

Note: Pay items can be overridden if the Allow Value Override on Employees (Standard Pay) and/or Allow Value Override in Pay Runs (Current Pay) options are ticked on the Additional Info tab of the Pay Items (MP.PP.22.10) form. Pay items that can be overridden are not updated in employees' Standard and/or Current Pays when the pay item is edited.

Note: Changes to a pay item entry that were entered in the footer section of the Employee's Current Pay (MP.PP.31.30) form are not affected when a pay is updated; neither are the details of any leave entered.

Completing Pays

Once you're ready to close a pay off, select Complete. This finalises the employees' pays and generates their payslips.

Note: While the pay's data was taken from each employees' Standard Pays initially, once completed it is stored separately, which allows for completely reliable historical reporting, since none of the values need to be recalculated.

Payslips

On the Payroll Preferences form (MP.PP.11.00), you can choose how payslips are generated, either automatically on payrun completion, or manually through payslip processing. It's possible to generate preview payslips while processing a pay, but they are not finalised until the pay is completed.

Once a pay has been completed, yellow file icons appear next to each employee's name. Clicking on one of these icons opens the payslip for that employee. You can also download all payslips from the pay by selecting All Payslips from the Reports menu.

Payslips can be emailed to employees or printed out and distributed to them; the Settings tab on the Pay Details (MP.PP.23.10) form contains options for how each employee should receive their payslips. Selecting Process Payslips from the Actions menu of the Pay Run form distributes the payslips out according to the employees' payslip settings.

Note: Finalised payslips are saved as PDFs and retained by the system for historical reporting—if you view an employee's payslip at a later time, the system will show you the actual PDF that was generated at the time, rather than generating a new one from the data.

Payslips can also be regenerated for a pay run. A Regenerate Payslips action is available on the Pay Run Details form for pays where payslips have already been generated. Selecting this action removes all existing payslips for the pay run and generates new ones.

If you need to provide historical payslips to an employee, you can go to the Pay Details form (MP.PP.23.10) and use the View Payslips action.

Distributing Employees' Pay

Each employee's pay is distributed according to the pay distribution set up for them on the Pay Distribution (MP.PP.23.30) form. The pay distribution specifies how the employee's pay should be divided up (if at all) and the bank accounts that each portion of their pay should be paid to. In the simplest case, the full balance of an employee's pay will be paid to a single bank account, but it is possible to pay separate amounts to separate accounts. Pay distributions also specify the Payment Method and Cash Account that will be used to pay employees' pays.

When a pay run is completed, a payment batch is created for each Payment Method/Cash Account combination occurring in the pay run. Batches can be reviewed and approved on the Batch Payments (MP.PP.34.00) form, and then exported. Exporting a payment batch generates a bank file in the format specified by the Payment Method, which then can be downloaded and used to transfer the employees' pays to the bank accounts specified by their pay distributions.