Be payday filing ready by April 1st

We can confirm our payday filing feature will be available the week commencing 18 March 2019. In the meantime, we recommend joining one of our upcoming ‘Getting ready for payday filing’ webinars and going through a preparation checklist.

No. As long as you have a myIR account for your company you can connect to that directly from Xero and authorise payday filing without talking to Inland Revenue (IR).

New companies need to contact IR to register as an employer and get a new myIR account set up.

If the employer is using a payroll bureau that is not their tax agent for payroll, then there is a need to 'Grant access' to the payroll bureau.

Note: Every employer will be automatically opted in to payday filing before 1 April and you will be able to establish a connection to IR from within Xero Payroll from the week commencing 18 March 2019.

Your payroll filing will work much like GST e-filing in Xero today - a direct connection between Payroll in Xero and Inland Revenue, allowing Xero Payroll customers to automatically file pay information after each pay run.

The great news is there will be no change to the current payroll workflow except there will be less to do at the end of the month.

This means you'll:

• no longer have to file upload in myIR
  Note: Xero will no longer be providing a file download that can be uploaded via myIR. Filing direct from the payroll will be the only method supported.

• easily make adjustments and be able to amend information you've already filed.

Each user should have their own myIR login. Either as a:

• staff member of a practice/tax agency (client must be linked to the tax agency for payroll taxes)

• staff member of the business

• third party granted access by their clients.

The client should not be using the tax agent’s login, and vice versa.

Note: The connection from the Xero organisation to Inland Revenue needs to be established only once per user and then you don’t need to worry about it for future pay runs.  So if multiple people are posting pay runs for a business, each person will need to set up their connection once with the appropriate myIR login.

It is really easy to correct the payroll filing.  In fact, the process is similar to what you would do now.  In Xero, simply revert the pay run which contains the incorrect information, make the necessary changes and repost the pay run.  This process will overwrite the previous filing with Inland Revenue. It’s important to know that there is a 15 - 30 min delay from when the pay run is posted to when it would show up as filed at Inland Revenue’s end.  

This can be done any time before the next pay run is started. But ideally once a pay run has been paid, it should not be reverted and changed for audit purposes. Depending on the scale of the corrections, these would be done in either an unscheduled pay run, or included in the next pay run. For example,  a missed employee would more than likely be included in an unscheduled pay run, but a minor error in the number of hours could be held over to the next pay.

If a filing fails, Xero will send an email to the Payroll admin(s) to advise of the error. Once the issue has been corrected, the pay run can be manually filed. If IR is down, we will queue up the filing until they are back up and running.

The obligations in Taxes and Filings will still be generated, but it will only show the payment obligations, not the filing obligations. This way customers will still see how much needs to be paid and by when.

Employers cannot ask for employees’ date of birth during the hiring process. But once an employer is hired, employers can ask for the employees date of birth.

Xero requires the date of birth to allow employers to correctly manage KiwiSaver obligations for employees under 18 and over 64 (employers do not need to make contributions to employees under 18 and over 64, unless they have agreed to do so).

If an employee refuses to give their date of birth, enter an estimated date  depending on whether they are under 18, over 64 or somewhere in between. If unknown, assume they are between 18 and 64, until advised (by the employee or IR) otherwise.

No. Payday filing compliance is all part of your Xero Payroll subscription.