Pay staff from their timesheets
Work out one period's hours, tax, super and net pay for every employee, then write each of them a payslip.
Run Pay does the arithmetic itself. It reads the hours sitting in the Timesheets table, works out PAYG withholding and the Superannuation Guarantee for each person, and writes them a payslip. Pay review is the other one: it checks rostered hours and hands them to Xero, and Xero works out the tax. A period belongs to one of them, not both.
Nobody is put on a pay run by hand. Everybody with hours in the Timesheets table inside the period is on it, so the hours have to be entered before you start. Run Pay reads five fields there: Employee, Date, Hours Worked, Status and Pay Run.
Pay runs work out Australian PAYG withholding, super and award rates, so they are only available to companies based in Australia. Opened by a company anywhere else, the page says Not available in your country and nothing else.
On this page
Open Run Pay
Click Run Pay under Tables in the sidebar. It opens on the runs you have already made, newest period first, with the period and its status on each row.
If you run more than one site, pick it at the top right first. The chooser lists your venues and any associated companies. Everyone sits above each company's venues, and an Open tag marks your own company. What you pick decides which runs you see, and which site the next one covers. Each run's row then names its venue.
An amber bar across the top says Tax withholding coefficients are not verified as current, and links to the ATO NAT 1004 Schedule 1 they were taken from. Check them against that document before you pay anybody real money from these figures. The bar stops appearing once somebody has.
Start a pay run
Click the plus beside Pay Runs. With a venue picked, the form names it under This run covers before you type a date. Set Period start and Period end, then click Create. The run appears in the list as Draft and opens for review.
Run Pay reads both dates against the Date on each timesheet row, and counts both days. A run covers at most 31 days. A mistyped year therefore fails rather than sweeping up every unpaid timesheet you have.
The length of the period also decides the tax. Run Pay taxes seven days as a week, fourteen as a fortnight, and scales any other length between the two. So a fortnight typed as fifteen days withholds a different figure from the same money.
Read the review
Every employee with unpaid hours in the period gets a row: Hours, Gross, Tax, Super and Net, with a Total underneath. Nothing has been written yet. The figures are worked out again every time you open the run.
Hours is the sum of Hours Worked on their timesheet rows. Gross is those hours at the Default rate on their staff record. Tax comes from Tax-Free Threshold Claimed and Has HELP/HECS Debt, both under Payroll on that same record, applied to what the period works out to per week. Super is 12% of gross and is paid on top, which is why Net is gross less tax and takes no notice of it.
Once there are more than three people on the run, Find an employee and Sort by name appear above the table. Sorting by hours, gross or net puts the largest first, which is the quickest way to find the figure that looks wrong.
Total adds the four money columns of the rows on screen. Type into Find an employee and a count appears beside it, such as 3 hidden by the search. The total then covers what you can see, not the whole run.
Check who a venue's run covers
A run for one venue carries that venue's name and the word only at its head. It pays the people whose staff record says they work there. Everybody else keeps their unpaid hours for their own site's run.
With more than one venue, the table names each person's site under their name. That is what tells two similar names apart.
Somebody's site is set on their staff profile, under Where they work.
Set a rate on anybody missing one
A warning triangle beside a name means no hourly rate is set on that person's staff record. Their Gross comes out at zero, and processing the run skips them with No hourly rate set on this employee's record.
Open their staff record, fill in Default rate, then click the run again in the list to work the figures out afresh.
Process the run
Click Process pay run. It writes one payslip per employee, one at a time, and reads Processing pay run... until the last one is done.
Stay on the page while it runs. The browser asks before you leave, because a run that stops half way has paid some of the list and not the rest, and it cannot be started again from where it stopped.
Each name comes back Paid, or with the reason it did not go through. One person failing does not stop the ones after them.
What the run leaves behind
Each employee gets a payslip numbered PS-2026-000001, holding their hours, gross, tax, super and net, plus the year to date totals for the financial year the period starts in. A payslip cannot be edited or deleted once it is written.
Their timesheet rows are marked Paid and tagged with this run, so no later run can pay those hours again. The run itself moves to Processed and keeps Processed At, Total Gross, Total Tax Withheld, Total Super and Employee Count.
Open a processed run again and it says No unpaid timesheet hours found in this period. It names the venue where the run covers one. Its hours are Paid now, so that message is the run having done its job rather than an error.