It is vital that you set up your payroll settings accurately for your payruns to run smoothly. Our platform makes this as simple as possible and this guide will take you through the steps to get you to that vital first pay run and also show you more complex options available and how to incorporate them into our platform.

Glossary

Business Details.
ATO Settings.
STP Settings.
Register with Beam.
Pay Schedules.
Adding an employee.
Installing awards.
The next steps.
Employee access.
Pay runs.

Business details

You can use the Business Details feature to update your organisational information stored within Payroll classic. The Payroll classic platform will reflect theses changes you made in the business details section throughout the entire Payroll classic platform. To read more information refer to the following article.

Field explanations

Business Name

We will show the name entered here, throughout the platform (required).

Legal Name

We will show the name entered her on your pay slips

Is this a foreign (overseas) entity?

Select this checkbox if the employing entity is a foreign entity and then select the country of the entity's origin. The step is essential if you have employees classified with the income type Inbound assignee to Australia that you employe under this entity as it needs to be reported through STP.

ABN

Australian Business Number and should be 11 characters long.(required).

Contact Email Address

We will send all platform generated email notifications from the email listed on the business details page, except for pay slips, if there is a different email set up on the Pay Slips page.

Standard Hours Per Day

We use this field to predict leave and predict rates for date rate employees (required).

Work Week

We use this field to determine the default period end day that the platform will use for pay runs and timesheets.

External ID

We use this in some cases if integrating with an external platform.

Allow SMS notifications

Check this option to allow the platform to send SMS notifications to employees on your behalf (charges apply).

Automatically update super rates

From July 1st 2013, to 2025, super guarantee rates will increase gradually from 9% to 12%. Check this box if you want the platform to update these rates automatically

ATO settings

You will use these details to identify this business to the ATO during electronic lodgements. The setting requires you to select the relevant scenario for the business. That is, who will be submitting reports to the ATO for this business. The three options available are the employer, the registered tax/BAS agent, or an intermediary for multiple employing entities. You can read further information on how to set these up here.

STP settings

Enabling electronic lodgement will allow you to lodge STP events seamlessly to the ATO as well as lodge employee tax file declarations online directly to the ATO. Here is our comprehensive guide to Single Touch Payroll (STP)

Warning

Before you enable electronic lodgement within the payroll software, you will need to contact the ATO and provide them with your software provider and software ID information. The software ID is a unique number per business and so you should not share it with anyone else outside the ATO.

Register with Beam

You can easily pay employee super contributions directly to any registered super fund in Australia by taking advantage of the inbuilt integration with the Beam super fund clearing house. With Beam, you do not need access to an external portal; you can access all Beam information within your payroll platform, using one easy login. You can read further information on how to set it up here. Next up is to learn how to automate superpayments using Beam; you can read further information on this process here.

Important

Any time you go to the Beam site to make changes you must progress through to the end of the Beam wizard process, accept Terms and Conditions and click the Back to Payroll button or else the information will not sync correctly back to payroll. If you have multiple employing entities set up in your payroll file, you will need to register the additional employing entities separately. Refer to the following article for more information.

Pay schedules

Next you need to establish Pay Schedules. As an organisation, you would use a pay schedule to determine at what time intervals your employees will receive payment. Your organisation could have employees on weekly, fortnightly or monthly schedules, each with a different setup that makes sure your employees get paid the correct amount at the correct time.

Watch the training video

We have listed below some additional articles you can read on this topic:

Adding an employee

Next, you need to add employee details to your business. There are two ways to do this:

Via the self-service employee setup
Via Import Employees

Installing awards

Awards are a set of rules that govern how you pay employees of different levels of skill, tenure, industry, and many other factors based upon their time worked. Fair Work is the government body in Australia that sets out the different award conditions. Some employers pay employees based on the rules of these awards, and other employers pay employees using other schemes. We have a selection of articles to help you understand how to install and use awards in your platform.

The next steps

Once you have conquered the basics, the below articles show how you can setup the platform to cater for your needs if you have a more advanced payroll scenario.

Employee access

The below articles show how you can create a win-win situation for you and your employees:

Employee portal settings and Portal management
Timesheet overview
Rostering overview
Clock Me In - Setting it up as an employer and employee

Pay runs

The list below sets out what you need to action to complete a pay run:

Watch the training video