Employee Superannuation Contributions: how to know you have it right

Keeping across all the necessary entitlements for employees, for all your payroll clients, can not only be time consuming but heavy on manual labour. Superannuation is one of those things. Accountants and bookkeepers will know, the general super guarantee percentage went up to 10% as of July 1, 2021. In the meantime, any remaining unpaid April-June super contributions must be received (by the superannuation fund) by July 28. Payments can take up to 7 days to process: so, you best ensure all payments are made by July 21, or you risk copping penalties for late payments. Just released, in time to help you, help your clients ensure they’re compliant with their superannuation requirements, is our new XBert risk alert:

Check Employee Superannuation Contribution.

This clever alert will audit your accounting software files to find any discrepancies or anomalies in superannuation payments – so you don’t have to. This specific alert runs only in July for the previous financial year and will review each payslip, for each employee, for all clients over the last year. It will be able to validate that 9.5% of ordinary time earnings that should incur Superannuation Guarantee Contributions, was provisioned for in the employees’ data. If something doesn’t look right – it’ll appear on your Work board for attention.

So much more than Superannuation checks

This brings the total number of XBert’s AI-Audit risk alerts close to 60. That’s almost 60 sophisticated algorithms (eXpert Business aLERTs, XBerts) trawling your client data multiple times a day, alerting you to any errors, issues, inconsistencies and anomalies in your accounting software, as they arise. Think of them as your silent business partners, toiling away working hard on the mundane manual checks, so you don’t have to.We call it ‘working by exception’. Instead of checking all the things, all the time – you can work more efficiently knowing what needs attention and what doesn’t. And even better: trust the numbers are accurate.If you work with trades and construction like Nicole Lynch of Streamline Management, you’ll know how time consuming manual ABN and GST checks can be. Of course, most bookkeepers work on these checks progressively during the year but come end of financial year, everything has to be checked again – and can induce some surprises.

“One of our client’s had a supplier that changed hands during the year. The business name stayed the same, but the ABN and GST status changed. It wasn’t until we prepared the TPAR and double checked the ABN we realised what had happened and so the race was on to create a second contact, reassign the transactions and change the GST coding. Because the business name hadn’t changed there weren’t any alarm bells.

“XBert now alerts us to issues like that as they happen, so we can address it right away and know when we get to year end everything is correct.”

That’s just one example. There are LOADS of other useful XBerts for cash flow, invoices, bills, payroll, bank account, duplicates, unusual activity and account coding errors and anomalies.Some examples of issues XBert alerted our users to, before they were aware:

• A bookkeeper had a typo in the ABN on their printed Invoice, which XBert picked up.
• A Junior had not provided their TFN but had since turned 18 and no one picked it up. Except XBert.
• A popular brand metro coffee shop a client went to regularly, was charging GST on their invoices but using an ABN that was not registered for GST.
• A bookkeeping client missed a whole clients payroll.
• Another bookkeeping client accidently uploaded the payroll 3 times.
• A main brand service station was charging GST and the invoice on the ABN on their receipt was not registered for GST.

XBert's got your back

Why spend hours trawling data, looking for possible errors and triple checking your work? XBert's AI Audit has 100% got your back.And that's just the beginning. Adding in our practice productivity tools, built specifically for accountants and bookkeepers, will revolutionise the way you work. With XBert you will:• Sleep better knowing your client files are clean and healthy. • Have effortless visibility over the size and complexity of your client files. • Stop stressing about client retention with White-labelled Client Consoles • Free up time, and have the systems in place, to scale your business.Start a free trial today to find out how you can take productivity to a whole new level.