COVID-19 wage subsidy (JobKeeper) payments

1. Click your business name and choose Accounts list.
2. Click Add new. The Add new box appears, in the Accounts tab.
   

3. Enter a unique Account Number.

   Don’t use your real account number for bank and credit card accounts

   The number you enter here is only used for tracking the account in MYOB Essentials. You don’t need to use your real bank or credit card account number.

4. Enter the Account Name as JOBKEEPER SUBSIDY NO GST.
5. Choose Income from the Account Type list.
6. Choose NTR from the Tax Rate list.
7. Click Save to add the accounts.
   Here's our example:
   

You can now set up the required pay items to ensure JobKeeper payments are reported correctly to the ATO.

You'll need to set up pay items for:

• JobKeeper top-up - this is for employees earning less than the JobKeeper payment amount, or they've been stood down, who must be paid a top-up to bring their taxable gross to $1,500 per fortnight.
• JobKeeper start - this is for all employees to let the ATO know when you've started paying an employee JobKeeper payments. You'll only use this once for each employee to indicate when their JobKeeper payments started.

You only need to set up these pay items once.

3. Do your first pay under JobKeeper

The first pay you complete under the JobKeeper scheme will look quite similar to any other pay day, but with these changes:

• You'll enter $0.01 against the JOBKEEPER-START-FNxx pay item for each employee you're paying. You only need to do this for the employee's first JobKeeper pay.
• You'll increase the PAYG by 1 cent to balance the pay.
• If you're paying an employee who's earned less than the JobKeeper payment, or the employee has been stood down, you'll enter a value against the JOBKEEPER-TOPUP pay item.

Also, let's establish the JobKeeper payment amounts you'll need to pay (before tax) based on an employee's pay frequency:

Now, let's take you through it:

1. From the Payroll menu, choose Enter pay. The Pay centre page appears. 

2. Under Confirm dates:

   1. In the How often field, choose the pay frequency. For example, if it's a weekly pay, choose Weekly.

   2. In the From and To fields, chose the first and last day of the pay period.

   3. Choose the Pay on date. This is typically the day you're processing the pay run.

3. Under Select employees to pay:

   1. Select the employees you're paying.

   2. Click in the Email   column to select which employees you want to email payslips to. You'll need to have entered their email addresses on the Employee details tab of their employee record to be able to email their payslip.

      A tick  shows in the Bank File column if the employee is being paid electronically.

4. Under  Pay run , click  Start pay run . The  Pay run  page appears where you can review the pay details.

On the Pay run page, enter the number of paid hours against the JobKeeper pay item and reduce their Normal hours by the same amount.:

Here's some examples:

After entering the JobKeeper amount and adjusting the employee's Normal amount, complete the rest of the pay run as normal.

After an employee's first JobKeeper pay

If you've submitted the employee's first JobKeeper pay to the ATO via Single Touch Payroll reporting, you can unlink the JOBKEEPER-START pay item from them.

Like this:

1. Go to the Payroll menu and choose Employees.
2. Click the employee's name.
3. Click the Pay items - earnings & deductions tab.
4. Under Earnings, click the ellipsis button next to the JOBKEEPER-START pay item and choose Unlink from employee.
5. Click Save to save your changes to the employee.
6. Repeat from step 2 for all other employees that you've submitted their first JobKeeper pay for.

You will now be able to process subsequent pays in a similar way to the first pay, but without using the JOBKEEPER-START pay item.

4. Receive JobKeeper payments from the government

The JobKeeper payments from the government will be deposited into your nominated bank account. Here's how to record those payments in MYOB Essentials.

If you use bank feeds

The deposits from the government will appear in MYOB Essentials when your bank feed transactions appear.

• If you've already recorded a Receive Money transaction for the deposit (as described below), you can match the bank feed transaction to it.
• If you haven't already recorded a Receive Money transaction for the deposit, you can allocate the deposit to the income account you created earlier. For details about allocating, see Allocating bank transactions.

If you don't use bank feeds, you'll need to manually record a Receive Money transaction.

Here's how: