Paying 'weekly' paid employees more than 52 times per annum

Zac Jones

We have been processing a 'weekly' paid employee's wages through payroll on average about 75 times per annum (instead of the correct 52 times).

That is, we have been paying the employee for approximately 23 more weeks than he has actually worked each year. Obviously, this sounds extremely good for the employee & extremely bad for us as his employer.

But don't be too concerned as we have agreed to pay him these 'extra' payments from time to time. So from a financial point of view, we are ok with this issue.

However, our problem is the "paid-from" & "paid-to" date fields which are shown each time we process a pay through payroll, now show this employee as being paid up to a specified date in the future.

I would like to know if this is going to have any negative impact or repercussions when we come to the end of the financial year?

I have been keeping an eye on the PAYG tax being deducted and the superannuation being calculated and it all seems to be correct based upon the gross amount he has received. But is there something I may have neglected to observe?

Just for your info, this employee does not accrue holiday pay or sick pay, so those items are of no concern to us.

Any advice is much appreciated.

John Graetz

HI Zac.  Firstly from the point of view of the Annual Payments Summary, the value of gross salary works on the actual date of payment to the employee, irrespective of the dates that you might have shown on the pay slip. So, as long as you are not also recording the date of payment as being some date in the future, you will not have any problems.  
One suggestion that I would have for you is that when you have a payment which is not in accord with the usual weekly pay cycle, you process this as an Unscheduled Payroll instead of Scheduled Payroll.  By doing this, you can edit the date of the actual period involved.  The only issue that you would tend to have is that the employee is possibly having too little tax deducted because each weekly pay is factoring in the tax free threshold again for those 23 weeks of the year.  This assumes that the tax code is set at 2-TFT. 
John L G