Overview

As an organisation, you may utilise multiple employing entities that each have a different IRD Number that need customisation options tailored for each entity. A Payroll platform that offers this level of flexibility will enable you to tailor your organisational setup based on each entity, meaning you can view, report and process payroll actions on a per entity basis.

The Employing Entities feature allows you to add additional employing entities and specify details such as the unique IRD number, contact name, address and signatory name. This also allows your organisation, for example, to have the correct pay slip information and logo displayed for your employee regardless of which entity they work under.

Getting Started

Access Employing Entities by logging into your Payroll Account
Click on Payroll Settings
Navigate to Business Settings
Click on Employing Entities
Click the Manage Employing Entities tab

Add a new Employing Entity

Click Add
Complete the following fields
Click Save

Name: This is the legal company name (employing entity) that employs the staff.
NZBN: The NZBN of the employing entity.
IRD Number (NEW FIELD): The IRD number of the employing entity.
Payday Filing Final Return: This box should be ticked if this is the final return and the company will not be submitting any further payday filing.
Employer deductions payment frequency: This needs to be set according to the frequency you pay your payday filing to IRD.
Address: The address of the employing entity.
Contact Name: The contact person of the employing entity.
Contact Phone Number: The phone number of the employing entity.
Contact Fax Number: This is an optional field.
Contact Email Address: The contact person's email address.
Pay Slip Notification from Email Address: If you have an email address that is different to the one listed on the pay slips page that you would like to use as the Sender for pay slip notifications for employees assigned to this entity, you can add that here. If no email is entered here, the system will use the email listed on the pay slips page.
Note: Due to the sensitive nature of payroll information that will potentially be sent from these email addresses and the likelihood the emails will be treated as spam, we have placed restrictions on the email domains we will allow and therefore what emails can be entered in this field. More information can be found here.
External ID: This field is only required if you use an external system to track payroll data and so need it to sync with the payroll system when importing files.
Choose a logo: This refers to the pay slip logo. If you want a different logo appearing on the pay slip for this employing entity, upload the logo. If no logo is uploaded here, it will revert to the default pay slip logo uploaded from the Pay Slips settings screen.

Change the logo

Access Employing Entities by logging into your Payroll Account
Click on Payroll Settings
Navigate to Business Settings
Click on Employing Entities
Click the Employing Entity that needs a logo added.
Click the Choose a Logo button and select the required file.
You will now see the uploaded logo on your screen.
You follow these same steps to edit or delete a logo.

Add a Pay Schedule for a new Employing Entity

To lodge a payday filing and employee details for the new Employing Entity, you need to add a new pay schedule that relates only to that employing entity so that only those entity's employees are paid in that pay run for that entity.

How to set up the pay schedule:

Access Employing Entities by logging into your Payroll Account
Click on Payroll Settings
Navigate to Pay Run Settings
Click on Pay Schedules
Click Add
Complete the following fields:

Name: Name for the pay run to identify it by.
Frequency: Frequency the run occurs
Included employees: For this situation, choose Employees with this pay schedule as their default and employed by the following employing entity.
Pay Slip message
Pay run warnings
Pay run finalisation settings
IRD Payments
Pay Run Automation
Pay Run approval

Click Save

For more information on setting up Pay Schedules, see this support article here.

Reassigning an Employee to an Employing Entity

You can reassign an employee to an employing entity in two ways:

1. On an individual basis, or,

2. Where more than one employee needs to be reassigned you can do this in bulk.

In both cases, you will also need to change the Pay schedule to the one pertaining to the employing entity you are changing the employee to.

This is done via the employee's file

How to assign an individual employee to an employing entity:

Open the employee file and click Tax Code Declaration
Click Change Employing Entity. The employing entity will be set to the main business as the default.
From the New Employing Entity drop down, select the employing entity you wish to assign this employee to.
Choose to make the change effective as of 'today', 'employee's start date', or 'custom date' and then click on the 'Change Employing Entity' button to save.
Go to the employee file
Click on the Pay Run Defaults page
Change the Pay Schedule to the one you have setup for the employing entity.

How to 'bulk' assign employees to an employing entity:

Go to Payroll Settings
Navigate to Employing Entities
Click on the Reassign Employing Entities tab
You can select individual employees by typing their names into the Employees field and selecting them from the drop-down list that appears; or
Select to bulk reassign All Employees in the business; or
Select to bulk reassign All Employees (including terminated employees);
Once you have determined the employees you wish to change choose the new entity the selected employees will be changed to from the New Employing Entity drop-down list. If you only have one other employing entity, this will show as a default option;
Choose to make the change effective from 'today', 'employee's start date', or 'custom date';
Click Change Employing Entities to save.
Change each employee’s Pay schedule to the correct one for the employing entity.

Payday Filing for an employing entity

Once you have completed your first pay run for an employing entity, you can do your payday filing for it.

Go to Business settings
IRD Settings
Set the Pay Day Filing method to Connect to IRD gateway services

You can connect with the employing entity’s login details through the Payday filing button that appears once the pay run is updated.

Helpful Hint

When you need to send the employee details to IRD, make sure you select the entity in the ED report so that employees that don’t pertain to that entity aren’t included.

Payday Filing for employing entities

If you want to use Gateway services for your payday filings, you need the following setup. Once you have completed your first pay run for each entity, you can link each entity individually to enable Gateway services and complete your submission based on which entity you have selected.

Payroll Settings
Employing entities
Add the IRD Number and Employer deductions payment frequency (new field) and the contact details
Save
Next, update the Pay Schedules.
Access Employing Entities by logging into your Payroll Account
Click on Payroll Settings
Navigate to Pay Run Settings
Click on Pay Schedules
In each Pay Schedule you will need to update the following:
Under Included employees select the dropdown and add Employees with this pay schedule as their default and employed by the following employing entity.
Once the Included employees field has been selected another field will appear – Employing Entity.
Select the dropdown and choose the employing entity the pay schedule relates to
This step is very important in order for the payday filing to be successful.
Click Save

Use Gateway services for all payday filings

Go to Business settings
Navigate to IRD Settings
Select the dropdown in Payday Filing Method
Select “Connect to IRD gateway services”
Click Save

Next, update the employee settings.

Click on Employee Settings, please check the Entity each employee is set to:

Open the employee file and click Tax Code Declaration
Click Change Employing Entity. The employing entity will be set to the main business as the default.
From the New Employing Entity drop down, select the employing entity you wish to assign this employee to.
Choose to make the change effective as of 'today', 'employee's start date', or 'custom date' and then click on the 'Change Employing Entity' button to save.
Go to Pay Run Defaults section and confirm the Pay Schedule the employee is attached to is correct.

Once the above has been completed, you can start a new payrun.

Once the pay run details have been entered and the pay run has been finalised, the Payday Filing button will appear.
Select the Payday Filing button, this will take you to the Payday Filing – Employment Information.
Connect to the Gateway Services (for this initial setup – if previously connected, please disconnect. You will only have to connect once – not every time you run a pay run)
Click Connect.
Log in on the IRD screen for the specific entity you are submitting for.
Go back to your pay run
Once connected, you will be able to report your employee details (if not previously reported). A message will appear advising to Submit the employee details now. This will need to be done prior to submitting the payday filing
Select Submit.
Under Employing Entity – choose the corresponding Employing Entity
Upload to Gateway Services

Once completed go back to the pay run, select the payrun you want to submit and lodge the Payday Filing

Select the Payday Filing icon within the pay run
You will then be directed to the Payday Filing – Employment Information.
Select the Submit payday filing button. Gateway Services is CONNECTED and Status is CREATED
When successful the Status will change to SUBMITTED

Manually uploading files

If a client doesn’t want to connect through Gateway Services, but would rather continue to manually upload their files. Download your report and upload the same as previously done. The difference being each entity will have their own IRD number showing on the reports rather than the main entity IRD number (nothing will need to be changed).

Delete an Employing Entity

An employing entity can only be deleted if an employee assigned to that entity has never been paid in a pay run. We do not allow users to delete an employing entity once it has been in use so that historical records and payroll reports are not affected.

To Delete:

Go to Business Settings
Navigate to Payroll Settings
Click on Employing Entities
Select which entity you want to delete. Hover your mouse over the employing entity and you will see a red "x" icon
Clicking on the "x" icon will trigger a delete confirmation dialog.
Click 'OK' to confirm deletion of the employing entity
N.B. If the icon is disabled (ie displays in a grey colour) you will not be able to delete the employing entity for the reasons specified above.

Restoring a deleted employing entity

Go to Payroll settings
Scroll down to Restore deleted items
Select Employing entity from the drop-down box
A list of all deleted employing entities will appear.
Click the Restore against the employing entity that you want to restore.

Helpful Hint

Things to note: Employing Entities:

If you have additional employing entities in your business file, most (but not all) reports will allow you to filter by employing entity.
You cannot be employed by two different entities within the same pay period. time.
Whilst you can process a single pay run with employees from multiple entities, the pay run will still only produce one pay run journal. ie: a separate journal will not be produced for each employing entity. To achieve that, you'll need to split the pay runs and process separate pay runs for each employing entity.
Also note that with payday filings, only employees pertaining to that employing entity should be included that pay run.
If an employing entity is changed for an employee, this will then create the need to produce an ED file for the old entity to report the termination for that entity as well as an ED for the new entity to report the employee as a new start for that entity.
It should also note that you can only have 1 bank account in each file, and one external integration (eg Xero).