There has been a lot of talk in the media about this, even though the majority of employees won’t be impacted. The Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) points out that the new annualised wage arrangements “do not affect all employees, or even most employees”. “Only about 20 of the 122 industry and occupational awards contain annualised salary clauses”. You can read the article New annualised salary clauses come into effect to find out which groups of employees are affected.

If you do need to start recording employee hours and unpaid breaks, you can use the standard Chris21 timesheets. The good news is, it may not be as onerous as you might think. Chris21 has two inbuilt timesheet functions that you can utilise. Also, bear in mind that you can use timesheets for recording and reporting purposes only. This means you can use your current processes to pay employees, you don’t have to pay by processing the timesheet

The key takeaway from this is you will have the ability to report over timesheet data as and when required. You can use this information when auditing payroll to ensure employees on annualised wage arrangements are paid correctly.

Let me show you how to achieve this. Contact me to arrange a no obligation meeting.

The post New Annualised Wage Arrangements – Using Chris21 Timesheets to Record Employee Hours appeared first on System Logic.

As a Chris21 user, you will be aware that Single Touch Payroll (STP) is on the way. Any employer who has more than 20 employees as at April 1, 2018 must commence STP reporting as from July 1, 2018. Single Touch Payroll is a digital initiative that will deliver real time salary and wage, and superannuation information for all employees in Australia. Single Touch Payroll for Chris21 is coming soon. You can expect the Chris21 vendor to deliver an enhancement to the software in the near future.

A brief background

Single Touch Payroll is a government reform to streamline reporting obligations. The Australian Government recently announced new rules for the way employers report tax and superannuation payments to the ATO. It means employers will report payments such as salaries and wages, pay as you go withholding tax and superannuation information direct to the ATO at the same time they make these payments to employees.

Since you will be lodging information with the ATO at the time you pay your employees, you will effectively be aligning your reporting obligations with your payrun cycle. This will replace the current reporting requirements of monthly or quarterly.

For more background read this article on LinkedIn from John Shepherd, the Single Touch Payroll Program Lead at Australian Taxation Office – Single Touch Payroll – reporting to government through natural business processes or Time for employers to get ready for Single Touch Payroll.

What will Single Touch Payroll mean for payroll processing in Chris21?

The introduction of Single Touch Payroll will require Chris21 users to add an additional step to their payroll processing procedures. After following your usual steps to complete your payroll you will then need to report tax and superannuation information for the pay direct to the ATO.

At this stage it is not clear exactly how this will work, however it is reasonable to surmise that a new interface or gateway to the ATO will be developed. With this in place, it should be a simple process to lodge the required information electronically, like Standard Business Reporting (SBR) functionality.

When the ATO receives your payroll information, they will match it to your records and your employees’ records. This means you may no longer need to provide your employees with payment summaries. If you report all payments relating to withholding tax via STP, you will not need to produce payment summaries because the ATO will provide that information to your employees through MyGov or through their pre-filled income tax returns. However, in cases where you do not report all withholding tax payments via STP, you must produce payment summaries for these exceptions.

How will the Chris21 vendor deliver Single Touch Payroll functionality, and when?

This is a question I can’t answer. However, I would assume that the vendor will deliver a software update prior to the end of financial year so that you can install and test the functionality.

The timing of the release of the STP software for Chris21 users is still unknown, and I’m sure you are eager to know more about this to help with your planning and testing. Perhaps if a representative from Frontier Software is reading this post they could kindly use the comments section below to update users on progress.

I will add comments to this post with any information about Single Touch Payroll that comes to my attention. If you have information that you think might be helpful, please share with your fellow Chris21 users in the comments below.

The post Single Touch Payroll for Chris21 appeared first on System Logic.

The idea behind starting the Chris21 Support Network Group is to engage the Chris21 community on LinkedIn to openly communicate with each other. The group is a place for users to ask questions or provide help and advice. As the group grows it will be a place where users will find a rich source of information about Chris21.

I started the Chris21 Blog back in 2012 in an effort to bring more Chris21 information online and help Chris21 users who are searching for answers. The blog continues to grow, with approximately 400 subscribers at the time of writing this post. The success of the Blog has given me encouragement that the notion of an online Chris21 user community is a worthwhile one and that people are gaining a real benefit from it.

This leads me to the main focus of this blog post, LinkedIn Groups. Because so many people are now members of LinkedIn it makes sense to me that it is a further avenue for building the Chris21 user community. The Chris21 Support Network group takes advantage of LinkedIn’s Groups feature to provide even more online help for users.

This post is a call out to all of my Chris21 Blog subscribers who use LinkedIn. If you have not yet connected with me on LinkedIn you can do so here. And if you haven’t joined the Chris21 Support Network please consider joining now. Click here to go the the group homepage and request to join. Your input could greatly help one of your fellow Chris21 users or you could find the information you are looking for. If you are having trouble finding the group let me know and I will send you an invitation to join.

Join the Chris21 Support Network group now. I strongly believe that the bigger the community the more beneficial it will be for all involved.

The post The Chris21 Support Network Group is now on LinkedIn appeared first on System Logic.

I started with the Chris21 blog as a way of putting up content that I thought Chris21 users would find useful. The blog is also a great way for users to easily leave comments and read the comments of other users. At the time I also started the Chris21 Support Forum. This was designed to allow users to start discussions and for other users to interact, much like the other forums you will find on the web. Unfortunately, the Forum wasn’t as successful as I had hoped so I discontinued it last year.

To improve the availability of Chris21 online support, I have recently started a group on LinkedIn called the Chris21 Support Network. LinkedIn groups are a great way for like minded individuals to connect and share information. The group is still in its infancy but as it grows I am confident it will become a rich source of information for all Chris21 users. I encourage all of my LinkedIn connections to join the Chris21 Support Network group if you haven’t already. Also, feel free to let others know about the group if you think it will be useful for them.

The post Chris21 Online Support – Growing the Chris21 Online Community appeared first on System Logic.

Firstly let me make it clear that I am all for Employee Self Service (ESS) systems and the obvious benefits that they can deliver to organisations.

While these benefits are loudly touted and well known enough that I don’t need to list them here, there are pitfalls to success that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Recognising the pitfalls can be the difference between successful Employee Self Service implementations and mediocre outcomes. If there’s not much to view or update in an ESS system or it’s difficult to access, then employees won’t see the benefits.

Here are some issues to consider:

Will all employees be able to access the system?

In some organisations, not all employees have a personal computer or email address. This is often the case for the traditional blue collar worker.

Sure you can setup ‘kiosks’ in lunchrooms and the like, but these can have their own issues, usually related to security. I mention this later in the article.

The risk is that rather than address access issues, organisations may find it easier to maintain manual systems for their ‘blue collar’ employees and implement ESS for the rest.

How will you approach training and change management?

ESS systems may be quite intuitive and easy to use, however many organisations will have policies regarding training.

The employees in your organisation may be very savvy with newer technologies and they may embrace it. Others may resist the change and require some degree of training to adapt.

Training for ESS systems can be difficult, time consuming and costly to undertake. At the very minimum, you will need to develop training manuals and/or instructions to assist employees. At the other end of the scale, you may need group demonstrations.

What about the human error factor?

I know this can be a big concern for payroll officers, in particular about the quality and integrity of the data being entered. This is especially relevant for data such as bank details and home address details.

There can also be issues with the format of phone numbers, and whether data is entered in upper case, lower case or a mix.

You will need to consider setting up controls to counter these concerns. A good example is email alerts whenever changes are made by users via HR21. My blog Using Chris21 Email Notifications in HR21 for Added Peace of Mind for more information. Additionally, you can run reports on a regular basis to check the quality of the data.

Has security been considered?

While your IT department will ensure sufficient security from a network perspective with corporate intranets and firewalls, there are other security issues to consider.

If you do need to setup ‘lunchroom kiosks’ for employees be aware that there can be security concerns relating to the printing of payslips to a communal printer.

Or, what if an employee forgets to logout correctly? Most systems will have timeouts, these should be set to 5 minutes at the most.

Also, password resets can be an issue and this will lead to more help desk calls. Single sign on systems, such as LDAP are critical to the success of Employee Self Service implementations.

What are the barriers to successful user uptake of the system?

You’re going to all the trouble of implementing the system so you want to be sure that it will be embraced by employees. I mentioned resistance to change earlier and this will be a significant issue for many organisations.

This can happen for many reasons, for example, managers who may have traditionally passed some functions onto assistants. These functions now must be handled by the manager because the system requires them to be logged in.

Organisations who take a ‘too cautious’ approach with their Employee Self Service Implementations just may not be offering enough to their employees. Why login if there’s not much to see?

Do employees understand how to access and use the system? This comes back to the question of training.

Don’t employees still rely on face to face interaction?

Some employees will still need to talk to someone in HR or Payroll so that they can understand exactly what is required when updating some data. Of course, this avenue will still be open to employees but the employees themselves may feel that this has been removed by ESS.

This is an important message to get across to all employees in your organisation during your training phase.

In addition to these issues, I have also seen some evidence of the divide between HR and Payroll departments. I’m not saying that this happens everywhere, but I would be interested to hear opinions from anyone in the HR and Payroll fields.

I often see HR wanting to put more information into the hands of employees, while Payroll are much more cautious about this, citing risks to data integrity.

Regardless of this, if organisations aren’t willing to recognise these issues and factor them into their planning, they run the risk of failing to attain all of the benefits that Employee Self Service implementations can deliver.

The post Employee Self Service Implementations – Ensuring Success appeared first on System Logic.

The Chris21 payroll upgrade seems to have gone well and after logging in everything looks ok. Testing is underway when you receive an email from the Payroll department. Something doesn’t look right…

Having been involved in the Chris21 payroll upgrade process for many years, and given that we are at that time of year when upgrades should be underway, if not completed, I thought I would share some of my experiences on what is an ‘interesting’ time of year for many clients.

Interesting might be an understatement, as some clients will find themselves perilously close to end of year processing responsibilities, while still finalising upgrades.

While the vendor will usually endeavour to release software upgrades half way through the financial year, it will not always be possible for clients to consider upgrading at this time due to other priorities. As the end of financial year approaches and clients begin their testing in earnest, then the issues in the software are discovered.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for users to find out what the current issues are. I know that a lot of clients are frustrated to discover they are testing and uncovering issues that are already known to the vendor.

The problem is, effective planning goes out the window as clients become dependent on the vendor to fix issues and release updates. And of course, updates mean even more testing. Add to this the fact that an upgrade is usually mandatory and the pressure is on the client to get the upgrade completed prior to the end of the financial year.

To overcome this, some customers will request that they be exempted from the upgrade until bugs are fixed and they are provided with a stable version of the software. The vendor will resist this – all clients on the same version of the software is the ideal from the vendor’s point of view. The customer, of course will see this differently. They want to be confident that the payroll system is doing what it is supposed to without manual workarounds.

So what’s the answer to a successful, stress free upgrade? I’m not sure that there is such a thing but here are some ideas:

• Try to start your testing as early as possible. You might not like the idea of being the guinea pig but the truth is you will get an early feel for what this particular upgrade will be like and can report issues early.

• Talk with other organisations that use Chris21. Some may have started their upgrades, and if not, they will be keen to hear about your experiences. The chairperson of your state’s user group is also a good contact point.

• Use Google. There’s more relevant information about Chris21 on the internet than you might think! Search for Chris21 forums or blogs, like this one.

Is there anything you could add to this list? Have you experienced problems with your upgrades? I would be interested to know your thoughts.

I’ll be putting more information in future blogs that will help Chris21 users. If you need help please don’t hesitate to contact me, tony.danher@systemlogic.com.au or call 0421 817 265. Good luck with your upgrade!

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Chris21 has built in functionality that allows you to do your own customisations. It’s a very useful tool and one that you have probably already taken advantage of. Chris21 customisations mean user defined changes to files, fields or forms. These changes can affect Chris21 or other interfaces, such as HR21.

Before I go further I would like to say that you do need to know what you’re doing if you want to delve into this area of Chris21. I would recommend some form of customisation training if you are not experienced.

If you have some experience with Chris21 customisations, you will understand the concept of the system and user areas of a file. I talked about this briefly in my blog Customising Chris21 – What Can Go Wrong? From my experience, it is the misunderstanding of this concept that causes the most issues with customisations. Many Chris21 systems I see have been customised in the system area of the file. In other words, existing fields are changed so that they can be used for different purposes.

It’s quick and easy to take an existing field and change some attributes to suit your purposes. Unfortunately this approach can cause you problems in the future.

So what’s the problem with this? The main problem is that if you use the system part of the file you can’t be guaranteed that system upgrades will not affect your customisations. There is the risk that a field that has been changed in the system area to suit your purposes may be overwritten by an upgrade. This could manifest itself as overlapping data or overlapping labels on forms. Even worse, if you have changed the data type of the field, say from an integer to a date, you may encounter errors when trying to update records.

What’s the best way to avoid this? Use the user area of the file. This area has been especially created for you for customisation purposes. The user area size is usually 120, meaning you can add fields up to a total of 120 characters onto the file. Importantly, any changes made in this area will not be overwritten during upgrades.

Keep this principle in mind when you undertake any Chris21 customisations. It will help to ensure the integrity of your database and give you less to worry about come Chris21 upgrade time.

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