Every screen and report in Subgrade that shows pay in dollars carries this line:
Estimated for budgeting. Your payroll software calculates final pay, tax, super and leave — small differences are normal.
Subgrade works out the facts and the gross: who worked, the hours in each pay category (ordinary, overtime, Saturday, Sunday, public holiday, night, rain), leave and stand-downs, allowances, and the rates on worked time. It exports those as units — hours, days, nights, kilometres — for your payroll software (MYOB or Xero) to price and pay.
Your payroll software is the record of what people are actually paid. Where its figure and ours differ, its figure is right.
Who this is for — Payroll, and anyone reading pay or labour cost figures in Subgrade.
The list
Subgrade does not calculate any of these. Each one is done in your payroll software, or handled the way described.
- Tax (PAYG withholding) — your payroll software withholds tax from the gross we export.
- Super contributions and SuperStream — super is paid and reported by your payroll software. The super in job costs is an estimate on ordinary hours.
- Single Touch Payroll (STP) — your payroll software reports each pay run to the ATO.
- Payslips — issued by your payroll software.
- Leave balances and accruals — we export leave taken as hours; your payroll software accrues and draws down the balances.
- Leave loading — applied by your payroll software when leave is paid. Job costs carry it inside the leave on-cost.
- RDO accrual — we export RDOs taken as hours; your payroll software accrues them.
- All-purpose allowances lifting overtime and penalty rates — we pay allowances at their own rate. Where your award adds them to the rate for overtime, your payroll software does that.
- Weekly overtime past 38 hours — overtime is worked out day by day from each pay level's daily hours.
- Minimum engagement — a short shift is paid for the hours worked, not topped up to a minimum.
- Span-of-hours and early-start penalties — hours are priced by day type and daily hours, not by the time on the clock.
- Shift loadings — afternoon and night shift loadings beyond the night rate on the pay level are not added.
- Higher duties — a day spent acting in a higher role is paid at the person's own level.
- Two roles in one day — each day is paid at one pay level.
- Junior and apprentice percentages — set these up as their own pay levels with their own rates.
- Termination payouts — unused leave, notice and redundancy are paid by your payroll software.
- Back pay — when a rate rise starts in the past, the Back-pay due report lists the difference; key it in your payroll software.
Job costs and on-costs
Labour on a job is costed at the wage plus the employer on-costs set on each pay level:
- Superannuation is charged on ordinary hours only — ordinary and rain hours, a casual's loading included. Overtime, Saturday, Sunday, night and public-holiday hours carry no super.
- Workers comp is charged on every hour of wages.
- Leave on-cost (permanents) is your provision for paid leave, as a percentage of ordinary wages. It is charged on permanents' ordinary hours only, never on casuals, who have no paid leave. Leave loading alone is about 1.35% of wages (17.5% of four weeks a year); a full annual, personal and public holiday provision is much higher. Set it from your own numbers.
Salaried and day-rate staff are costed at an implied hourly rate — the salary or day rate spread over your workspace's annualised hours (Payroll Settings) — with all their hours treated as ordinary time.
Back-dated rate rises
A pay level can be superseded from a date in the past — for example, a 1 July award increase keyed in on 15 July. Pay runs already finalised for those dates are never changed. Draft runs are recalculated when they are finalised.
On the new pay level, Back-pay due lists, for each employee and each finalised run, the hours in each pay category times the difference between the new rate and the rate paid. Salaried staff get the difference in salary for the days of the run on or after the rise. Download it as a CSV and key it in your payroll software as back pay.
To raise many pay levels at once, use Uplift rates on the Pay Levels list: pick the levels, a percentage or a dollar amount per hour, and the start date. You see each level's rate now and its new rate before anything is saved.