With the update coming in October 2023, we have made a substantial change to assist customers with applying and maintaining their standard listing of allowances across a range of employees.  

This is done with the introduction of the separation of Allowance Sets from Employee Allowances where they will now have the following functions;

1. Allowance Sets
   A customisable preset listing of allowances that can be quickly applied to a range of employees, changes made to items in the allowance set will automatically reflect across all linked employees for future payrolls.
   This is useful for applying generic or award-based allowances to a range of employees.
   
   
2. Employee Allowances
   Individual allowances can be applied on a per-employee basis. 

What changed, how did this used to work?

Prior to this change, allowance sets were considered more like templates that you applied to the employees. Once applied to employees any changes made to the set would not reflect on the individual employee instance. 

Due to this, any changes to the allowance conditions would need to be done on an individual per-employee basis.

Why did we make this change?

Customer feedback from businesses that operate using Industry awards. These awards generally have allowances included that need to be applied across a range of employees within the business, and when they need to be updated the changes affect all employees. 

As a use case for this:

"Pharmacy Award" as of 01/07/2023 
The rate for the Meal Allowance increase $20.14 from to $21.71 per shift
https://library.fairwork.gov.au/award/?krn=MA000012#_Toc141274677

With the use of the allowance sets on the new model, there would be one point to change this amount rather than needing to individually update this across all affected employees. 

What does this mean for my setup?

You may not initially need to do anything as all existing allowances will now be considered Employee Allowances, as such, the payroll will operate as normal.

Is there anything that I need to do, or be aware of?

For employees that you wish to use the allowance sets in the future, you will need to perform and check the following;

1. Setup\update the Allowance Set with the relevant global allowances.
2. Re-attached the employees to the relevant allowance set within their employee profile (Pay tab).
3. Check the Employee Allowances screen to ensure that there are no duplicate allowance items.

For more information on how to setup and use the allowance please see our Payroll Adjustments (Allowances & Deductions) article.