Travel Allowance

Andy_9860584

Can someone tell me how to set up travel allowance paid under the Road Transport (Long Distance Operations) Award (MA000039) to report correctly.

I believe our employee falls under the exception of PAYG withholding.

On the ATO website it states

* Don't withhold tax from travel allowance you pay your employee

* Don't include the amount of travel allowance in the allowance box on your employee's payment summary

* Only include the allowance on their payslip

I currently have it under Allowance Other>salaries & wages>allowances-other (Non Deductible)>PAYG Tax (I have not ticked this)>default rate (rate as per award)>Inclusions (I have not ticked) but this still shows on Payment Summary.

Alexis McKeown

Dear @Andy_9860584 ,

In Reckon Accounts Hosted, you will need to setup the Travel Allowance with Allowance - Other (Transport/Fares).

Additionally - you will need to set this up under Addition to allow it to track properly.

Kind regards,

Alexander McKeown

Reckon Senior Technical Support

JudyA

Hi Andy,

This sounds similar to the meal allowance we pay under the award in the construction industry. My meal allowance payroll item is set up as follows:

Name: Meal Allowance

Linked to our Expense account: Allowances - Untaxed: Meal Allowance

Tax Tracking Type: None (as you don't want it to be taxed, or appear in your STP reporting.)

Taxes: I have PAYG not ticked, but State Payroll Tax ticked

Calculated on quantity and then the rate

No items ticked for super inclusions.

This means the allowance is paid, it appears on the employees payslip, but it is not reported via STP (or therefore the old payment summary system).

I'd check your payroll item settings and if you cannot alter the existing one so that it does what you need it to, you may have to create and use a new one. HTH

Rav

Apologies for that @JudyA, your posts got caught in the Community's automated spam filter inadvertently. I've removed them from there now 🙂

JudyA

@Rav Thanks for the reply. Any way to remove the duplicate posts?

Rav

Yep sure is! All done 🙂

Andy_9860584

Judy, does your expense account Allowances - Untaxed:Meal Allowance sit under salaries and wages or on its own as an expense?

Thanks Alexander i will set up payroll item as addition. This is very helpful.

JudyA

I have all my expense payroll items grouped under either expense account "Payroll", or in the Cost of Good Sold area on my P&L, then I have all my sub-headings and then the individual allowances etc. I like it like this, so that when I go to do the BAS, or reconcile at the EOFY, I can see all the different payments. When I create a new payroll item, I map it to it's own expense, or COGS account.

As Alexander says, allowances need to be created as an addition, not salary and wages. This will help to track it to the right area. If your existing travel allowance has been set up as a salary & wages item, then I don't think you can change this, and will need to create a new payroll item as an addition.

Andy_9860584

Great thanks so much JudyA 🙂

Andy_9860584

I have set up Travel Allowance as an addition as per the above. Now my payroll summary report does not show the same figure at adjusted gross wages as what is reported through STP and pulled through to the ATO at W1.

Do i manually have to adjust my payroll summary report to deduct the travel allowance from gross wages to make this balance.

Hope I am making sense here 🙃

JudyA

Hi Andy, that is frustrating for you, I'm sure. It is hard to tell what is going on, but I assume there is something in your payroll item set up that is not quite right. It might be a good idea to have someone like Shaz @Acctd4 to have a look at your payroll items to see where it's going astray.

Andy_9860584

Thanks Judy, i will send her an email and see if i can sort.