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Important notice: Information provided by Deputy is intended for general guidance purposes only and is not a substitute for professional legal or financial advice. Deputy does not accept liability for actions taken based on this information. Employers are responsible for ensuring their employees are paid correctly in line with the applicable award/s, industrial instrument/s and relevant employment agreements. For specific issues or if you are unsure about your employee/s’ entitlements, please consult a legal, financial or employment relations specialist. Deputy does not offer advice on employment law or taxation matters, including payroll specifics. |
A regular pay run is how a business pays its employees on a schedule, such as every week, fortnight or month.
It is also possible to process ad hoc or unscheduled pay runs if required.
- Why process an ad hoc pay run?
- Accessing pay runs
- Processing an ad hoc pay run
- Complete the pay run
- Pay Your Team
Why process an ad hoc pay run?
An ad hoc pay run is a pay run that you process outside of your normal pay run schedule. It is typically initiated for reasons such as:
- you need to do a correction on an incorrectly processed regular pay run
- an employee is leaving, and you need to pay them out today before the next regular pay run
- paying bonuses or commissions that might fall outside the regular pay run
Accessing pay runs
Prior to processing any pay run, regular or ad hoc, please ensure you have completed these tasks.
Users with the access permissions of System Administrator or Payroll Administrator can access the Payrun page in Payroll.
Click on the Payroll tab and select Pay runs from the list on the left-hand side.
In the main section of the page, you can see a tab showing Upcoming pay runs and a second tab showing Processed pay runs.
On the top right-hand side of the pay run page, there is also a button to initiate an Ad hoc pay run.
Processing an ad hoc pay run
Once you have clicked on Ad hoc Pay run on the Payroll page, you will need to select which pay calendar ( aka pay cycle), that is, which group of employees, you are processing an ad hoc pay run for.
A pop up will appear with the pay run details. Complete the details for the new pay run.
Pay Cycle
The name you assigned to this pay calendar when you configured it
Adhoc
Select what type of ad hoc pay run you wish to process:
- Full Pay run will include all pay run calculations, the same as a regular pay run
- Blank Payslips will skip calculations, instead creating blank payslips ready for manual amendment
Staff
Select whether you want this pay run to be processed for all employees in the pay calendar or selected employees only using the check boxes.
Year
The financial year this pay falls in. Most of the time you will be operating in the current calendar year but make sure you pay attention to this setting if you are doing a pay run to adjust for historical pays that may be outside the current financial year.
The Payment Date might change the financial year for reporting purposes.
Run
Use the menu to select a pay period to process the pay run.
Birthdays
Any birthdays that fall within the pay period will be highlighted. This is of importance if a birthday triggers an age-related pay rate increase or age-related superannuation action for this employee, so please check you have the correct pay rates for this employee.
Payment date
The date the payment will be processed on. It is important to make sure this date is accurate now since all reporting will rely on this date as the pay date. It is also important that is date is a future date. If you set a payment date in the past and this is used to generate the ABA file then it is likely the bank will reject it. A date in the past may also impact your STP reporting obligations.
Runs in the year (first pay run only)
The number of pay runs expected to fall in this financial year will be shown:
- For weekly pay calendars, it could be 52 or 53
- For fortnightly pay calendars, it could be 26 or 27
- Semi monthly pay calendars will always be 24
- Monthly will always be 12 and semi monthly will always be 24)
For more information on how to manage financial years with 53 weeks or 27 fortnights, read our FAQs
Starting
The day of the week the pay run starts on. Irrelevant for Monthly and Semi-monthly.
Once you have completed all the fields in the new pay run popup, click Pay run.
This will now process your pay run, but NOT complete it.
Complete the pay run
Once a pay run has been processed, the next step is to review the team members' payslips generated in this pay run.
You will see the pay run has now moved to the Processed tab in Payruns and has the status of Processing.
In the the below example, the pay run has a $0.00 value as Blank payslips was selected as the ad hoc pay run option.
Click View to start viewing the pay slips for the ad hoc pay run.
You will now see all the payslips processed by the ad hoc pay run listed on the Payslips tab.
In this example, the payslips are 'empty' since Blank payslips was selected as the ad hoc pay run option.
We can now amend the payslips to make the payments that have triggered the ad hoc pay run. In the example, let's say every employee is getting a $500 bonus this week.
We could add the extra payment to each paylip individually by clicking on the + button to Add Payment.
However, a faster way to process this bonus would be to use Bulk Actions.
Click on Bulk Actions and select Payments.
Select the employees, receiving the bonus using the tick boxes.
Complete the required fields to add the extra payment for the bonus and click Add payment.
You will get a success message and can click Back to return to the Payslips page.
The payslips will show the Bonus extra payment added but also the necessary calculations for tax and superannuation (if relevant) applied to each payslip.
Review the pay slips and check all payments and calculations are correct. These are some of the things you might like to check or action:
- Add further payments if required
- If you need to change the tax calculated, for example, you have applied a different method to a marginal tax calculation, it is possible to do that directly in the payslip using the pencil button on the far right-hand side to edit.
Pay Your Team
After confirming all payslip details are correct, click the Complete Pay run in the upper right of the page.
Pay Your Team
The Pay Your Team page will now be displayed so you can make all the payments captured in the pay run.
1. Confirm Payment Date
Confirm that your payment date is in the future and correct according to the date you want the bank to pay your team.
Use the date selector to set the correct date if necessary.
2. Create a back up
This is an optional step but downloading a copy of the pay slips allows you to keep a copy of the pay run for your own records. Click Download backup.
A file will download to your computer with a list of all the payslips in this pay run, similar to the example below.
3. Download the ABA file
Download the Australian Banking Association (ABA) file which contains the net value of the payment for all employee in this payrun.
Click Download ABA.
A file with extension .aba will download to your computer.
4. Upload the ABA file to your bank
Upload you downloaded ABA file to your supported banking portal to pay all your team member in one go.
5. Lock the Pay run
This is the final action within Deputy that will signal your pay run is complete.
Click Lock & Continue
This action will trigger the following:
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- Lock the pay run
- Payslips will become available to employees.
- Timesheets will be marked as paid
- Leave balances will be updated in alignment to any leave timesheets.
- You can no longer make any changes to the pay run.
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Once the pay run is locked (this may take a few seconds) you will be automatically directed to Submit to ATO.
However, if you check the Pay Your Team page the pay run now displays Unlock.
You can unlock the pay run to make changes or correct a mistake, however this should only be done if you have not uploaded the ABA file yet (or submitted the STP). If the ABA file has already been uploaded (or STP submitted) and you discover a mistake in the completed and locked pay run, it is best practice to leave the pay run locked and instead create a new ad hoc pay run to make the adjusted payments to correct for the mistake.
Note: Once you unlock the pay run, it will revert to a draft state and employees will lose access to the payslips they previously had access to when you locked the pay run.
Once the pay run is completed and locked you are ready to submit the pay run information to the ATO via STP (Single Touch Payroll).
Note: You will need to manage when you submit the information to the ATO to meet your STP reporting obligations.