• Employee details, leave balances and pay history have come across in the upgrade
• Default pay items have been added to all of your employees
• Leave accrual is now controlled by pay items
• The pay cycle determines which employees appear when you do a pay run

(Australia only) Switch to Pay Super

If you previously paid employee super using MYOB's super portal, you need to switch over to the Pay Super service. There may also be other things you should do before doing a pay.

For more information, see Post-upgrade payroll tasks.

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Payroll menu is now grouped more logically

The Payroll menu is still where you pay your employees and keep track of their payroll information. It's now grouped more logically, so you have to do fewer clicks to perform functions.

Customisable Payroll Activity report replaces Payroll summaries

Payroll summaries has been removed from the Payroll menu to the Reporting menu > Payroll. It's also been renamed as the Payroll Activity report and you can see either a summary or detailed view (click the animation to expand it):

You can do a lot more with this new report, including:

• choose which employees to report on
• select and reorder columns
• export the report as an Excel file
• choose whether to show cents
• bundle the report with others in a report pack.

See Payroll reports.

New Payroll Settings options

Payroll settings has been removed from the Payroll menu, but you can still find it under your business name:

There are a lot more functions in Payroll settings and some previous functions have moved or changed.

Get more detailed employee information

You get a more detailed view and more customisation in employees in your new MYOB Essentials. Because of this, we've had to move some features to different locations.

To see your employee information, go to the Payroll menu > Employees and click the name of the employee:

Here's where you'll find things and what they're now called (scroll across to see new MYOB Essentials):

New employment basis and classifications fields

In the Employment section of the Employee details tab, you can now enter information to classify your employees.

Because these are new fields, we've had to give them default settings during the upgrade. While they don't affect your employee pays (they're only for reporting), it's worth checking them and changing them if you need to.

See all of an employee's pay in one place

In the employee (Payroll menu > Employees), there's a new tab, Standard pay:

This tab shows all of the details that make up an employee's default pay based on information recorded in other tabs — such as the pay cycle and the pay items assigned to the employee.

In old MYOB Essentials, you would have have to open multiple tabs and check a number of different fields to get the same information – in Standard Pay, it's all in one place.

Some pay item values, like tax, will be labelled as Calculated, meaning they're calculated each pay.

Set values will be displayed, but can be changed here or when you do a pay run.

Learn more about reviewing standard pay details.

Pay history has been brought across in the upgrade

You can view pay history in the Payroll details > Pay history tab of the employee:

There are some new pay items in the pay history (depending on the setup of the employee), such as Base Hourly, Base Salary and PAYG Withholding. These are the default pay items that are automatically added to employees that have come across from your old MYOB Essentials as well as any new employees you may create. For information on these, see Find out about the new pay items.

In the old Pay history tab, you could view past pay slips. Now you can get the equivalent information by going to Payroll > Pay runs:

See more detail in leave balances

In the employee Payroll details > Leave tab, you can see the employee's leave balances (in hours):

There are new columns, Balance adjustment, Carry over, Year-to-date and Total:

• Balance adjustment enables you to adjust the total leave accrued or enter leave opening balances. You can change this balance if you want. During the upgrade, the employee's Opening balance in old MYOB Essentials is added as a Balance adjustment.
• Carry over is the leave accrued from previous financial years. So now you get to see what proportion of total leave accrued is carried over from a previous year.
• Any leave taken during the current financial year is in the Year-to-date column
• Total is any Balance adjustment plus Carry over and minus Year-to-date.

If you click the Name of a leave accrual, you'll also notice that it opens a pay item. In the new MYOB Essentials, leave is now controlled by pay items – see Find out about the new pay items.

See what default pay items are added to your employees

The new MYOB Essentials comes with a set of default pay items. Some of these are assigned to your employees during the upgrade (depending on what wages, entitlements, leave and deductions they previously received):

• Base Salary and Base Hourly. Base Salary is assigned to salaried employees and Base Hourly is assigned to hourly-based employees.
• (Australia) Superannuation Guarantee. Superannuation Guarantee super pay item is for their mandatory 9.5% superannuation contributions.
• PAYG Withholding. PAYG Withholding is used to calculate PAYG on employee pays, for all tax tables (or tax scales) provided by the ATO.
• <LEAVE NAME> Accrued Per Pay and <LEAVE NAME> X Wks Pro-Rata (where X is the number of weeks leave the employee has an entitlement). As we mention below, leave accrual is now controlled by pay items. So if an employee had a leave entitlement in old MYOB Essentials they'll have a relevant leave pay item automatically assigned to them in the new MYOB Essentials.
  
  For example, Annual Leave Accrued Per Pay is assigned to salaried employees who have an annual leave entitlement and Annual Leave 4 Wks Pro-Ratais assigned to hourly-based employees who have a standard annual leave entitlement of 4 weeks.
  
  

All of these default pay items are set up to ensure that employees receive the same pay and entitlements they were receiving before MYOB Essentials was upgraded, so you don't need to do anything to them. However, if you want to check them out or if you want to customise them, see the steps below.

There are more pay items to cater to your needs

In your old MYOB Essentials, there were only two pay item types: Earnings and Deductions. In the new MYOB Essentials, you can create six pay item types:

These new pay item types enable you to create pay items that are more specific to the needs of your business and employees. You also get a more detailed view of the components that make up each employee's pay, whether you're looking at their pays slips, pay history or payroll reports.

You can easily assign pay items to employees, saving you from having to re-enter details in the employee each time.

For more information on setting up new pay item types, see Setting up pay items.

(Australia) Superannuation Guarantee is now a pay item, making super easier

In new MYOB Essentials, superannuation guarantee is tracked by a pay item. This pay item is assigned to all employees that had a super guarantee rate in their Superannuation tab in old MYOB Essentials

To see the details of this pay item, go to the Payroll menu > Pay items > Superannuation tab and click Superannuation Guarantee. The pay item shows all the employees that were automatically assigned to it in the upgrade as well as any previous exclusions, limits or pay items exempted from super calculations. The $450 threshold amount is entered by default.

The benefit of having superannuation guarantee set up as a pay item is that as you add employees, you simply add them to the pay item. And, if the rate changes, you just need to change it in the pay item, rather than edit every employee.

For more information about super in the new MYOB Essentials, see Superannuation.

Leave is now controlled by pay items for easier setup

The new MYOB Essentials uses leave pay items to track the hours of leave an employee accumulates. 

Previously, you would set up leave (annual leave and personal leave) for an employee by entering their annual entitlement and opening leave balance in the employee's Leave tab. Now when you create an employee, you just need to choose the leave pay items the employee is entitled to. For example, if they'll accrue personal leave, you need to assign them to a personal leave pay item. 

There are two parts to leave in the new MYOB Essentials:

• paying leave—when an employee takes leave, they'll be paid during that leave and their leave balance will be reduced
• accruing leave—an employee will accrue leave throughout the year.

In order to track these parts of leave, there are two types of leave pay items:

• a wages and salary pay item—to pay for leave when it's taken and to reduce the employee's leave balance
• a leave pay item—to calculate and maintain an employee's accrued leave

Here they are in your list of pay items (Payroll menu > Pay items):

(You might see other pay items in your file, depending on what leave you paid in your old MYOB Essentials)

And you can see both these types assigned to an employee, in the Salary and wages tab and the Leave tab of the employee:

You can track more types of leave

Being able to set up leave as a pay item means you can now create as many leave types as you like, such as:

• Rostered days off (RDOs)
• Time off in lieu
• Leave without pay
• Long service leave
• Paid parental leave

When creating a leave pay item, you also get more leave calculation options:

• User-entered amount per pay period –  choose this if you want to enter the hours to accrue in each employee’s standard pay, or manually enter hours accrued when recording the pays
• Equals a percentage of wages – choose this if your employees are paid on an hourly basis or work variable hours
• Equals dollars per pay period – choose this if your employees are paid a salary.

For more information, see Set up leave.

Exempting pay items from super and leave calculations

Any new pay item you create in the new MYOB Essentials will be automatically set to be included in all super and leave calculations. This differs from old MYOB Essentials, where the pay item was excluded by super and leave calculations by default.

If you want to exclude a pay item from super or leave calculations, you need to edit the relevant super or leave pay items and add the pay item you've created to the list of exempted pay items:

Employee pay cycle determines whether they appear in a pay

In new MYOB Essentials, the pay cycle is the default period an employee is paid for, such as weekly, fortnightly, monthly, etc. It's set in the employee in the Salary and wages tab of the employee (Payroll menu > Employees > Payroll detail tab).

The pay cycle set in the employee determines whether the employee appears in a pay run.

This cuts out the step of selecting the relevant employees for a pay run.

So, if you're doing a pay run and an employee isn't appearing, check what pay cycle has been chosen in the employee.

The default hours an employee works in the pay cycle, is determined by the Hours in a pay cycle field in the employee. The figure that appears here is based on the Hours per week field in the employee in old MYOB Essentials. You can change this if you want and it automatically updates if you change the pay cycle:

The Hourly rate and Pay cycle are based on their last recorded pay before the upgrade.

Paying employees electronically has improved

If you paid employees electronically using a bank file (ABA file), you can still do it in your upgraded MYOB Essentials and there's more smarts and options.

Electronic banking details have been brought across in the upgrade

Any employees you previously paid with a bank file retain their electronic banking details after upgrading, so you don't need to set them up again. You can see these banking details in the Payment details tab of the employee:

The bank account that you pay your employees from is also brought across in the upgrade, along with your electronic banking settings. However, these details are no longer stored in Payroll settings, but in the bank account itself:

Bank files are now processed via an electronic clearing account

Electronic payments are handled by an Electronic Clearing Account. This is a linked account. Linked accounts are similar to the system accounts in your old MYOB Essentials and work behind the scenes to make sure that the right accounts are used consistently and correctly. The Electronic Clearing Account handles your electronic payments.

You can view the Electronic Clearing Account by going to the Accounting menu > Manage linked accounts > Payroll:

When you pay employees electronically the Electronic Clearing Account will be credited (previously the payment was processed directly to the bank account you selected in the payroll settings of your old MYOB Essentials). Once you have downloaded your bank file, the Electronic Clearing Account will be “cleared” and you will see the amount deducted from the bank account you are paying from.

You get more control on when you can download bank files

In old MYOB Essentials, you were prompted to download the bank file immediately as the final part of processing a pay.

In new MYOB Essentials, when you complete a pay, you have the option to download a bank file by going to the Prepare electronic payments page. Or, you can go there later via the Payroll menu >  Pay employee via electronic payments (or via the Banking menu > Prepare electronic payments).

You can then select what payments to download a bank file for. This means you can batch up your bank files and download them in one go if you want.

(Australia only) New direct payments option

As well as using bank files, you now have a new way of paying employees and suppliers directly from MYOB without having to use a bank file. For more information about this, see Paying suppliers and employees electronically.

How matching payroll transactions in bank feeds works

How you match your payroll transactions depends on how you pay your employees.

For more information about how matching works, see Matching bank transactions.

(Australia) Changes to deleting a pay keeps STP reporting accurate

If you needed to change something in a recorded pay in your old MYOB Essentials, you deleted the pay then re-entered it. This deleted both the payment and the payslip and removed the pay from all payroll reports.

In the new MYOB Essentials, you can delete a pay if it hasn't yet been sent to the ATO via Single Touch Payroll reporting, or if it's been rejected. If it has been sent, you must reverse it instead. Reversing a pay ensures you're not deleting anything which has already been accepted by the ATO.

For more information on this, see Changing or deleting Fixing a pay.

(Australia) The new MYOB Essentials has you covered for STP Phase 2. See Getting ready for STP Phase 2.