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Overview

This user guide article you will learn how to create and complete Staff Payments Batch's. See the steps for this process below.

A draft Staff Payment Batch includes invoiced Task charges in the selected date range when the assigned staff member has the Contractor employment type and the charge has not already been placed in a Staff Payment Batch. Direct Charges and support charges without a linked Task are not included.

Finalise the relevant Invoice Batch first so the Task charges are linked to invoices. Each Charge Item also needs a Payment Rate before you can calculate the draft batch. Bank details and the provider's ABA settings are required only when downloading an ABA payment file, as explained below.

Staff Payment Batch Process

Once you have finalised an invoice batch, you can now create a Staff Payment Batch from the Staff Payments menu within the Finance functionality.

To create a Staff Payment Batch from within this menu click 'Create Batch'.

Once you have selected create batch you will be taken to the create payment batch screen. Within this menu you can select the date range for the charges you want to create a staff payment for. This function works similarly to how the invoice batch creation screen works. If you have charges outside of the range selected, Astalty will prompt you to adjust the dates to the earliest date of a charge. Once you are happy select 'generate draft batch'.

The next step to finalise the Payment Batch is to click 'Calculate Batch' and hit 'Confirm' in the pop up window.

At this point the calculation happens behind the scenes and Astalty will work out how much the total payment amount will be per charge within this batch.

You will then be taken to the Staff Payment Batches screen while the batch calculates.

Once this is finished calculating, click into the calculated batch. Here you will see the calculated charges included within the batch. Once everything looks correct you can click 'Finalise Batch' and hit 'Confirm' to finalise the Payment Batch.

To download the ABA Payment file associated with this finalised Payment Batch simply select the 'actions' button and select' Download ABA Payment File' from the dropdown menu.

This will prompt you to then select the Payment Date. The payment date is the date you expect to be paying the contractors from your bank. You will need to mark this as Paid and this is important when it comes to the reporting and the export file. If a Payment is not marked as paid then it will not appear within the associated reports.

Marking a Batch as Paid

The Actions button only appears once a batch is Finalised. A Draft or Calculated batch has to be calculated and finalised first — until then there's nothing to download and nothing to mark as paid.

There are two ways to mark a Finalised batch as paid, and the difference is the payment date:

Download ABA Payment File — opens the dialog above, where you choose the Payment Date and leave Mark as Paid ticked. Use this when the payment date matters, which is usually the case.
Actions → Mark as Paid — marks the batch paid straight away, dated today. Use this when you've paid the contractors some other way and just need the batch to reflect it.

Once a batch is Paid, the Mark as Paid option disappears from the Actions menu and the checkbox drops out of the download dialog — a batch can only be paid once. Download ABA Payment File stays available, so you can still retrieve the file if you need it again.

Downloading Xero Bills CSV (Optional Feature)

If your account has the optional Xero Bills CSV export feature enabled, you can download a CSV file of contractor bills once a Staff Payment Batch has been finalised.

To do this, click the ‘Actions’ button on the finalised batch and select ‘Download Xero Bills CSV’ from the dropdown menu. The file will be saved to your device’s downloads folder, and can then be uploaded into Xero to generate bills for contractor payments.

If you would like this feature enabled on your account, please contact support@astalty.com.au.

Voiding an Invoice and how this affects a processed Staff Payment Batch

To find out how to void an invoice simply head to our user guide article here.

Once an invoice is voided this will not change a finalised payment associated with the charge. If the charge is invoiced again and included in a later Staff Payment Batch, Astalty adds an adjustment line during calculation to account for the earlier contractor payment and avoid paying the same work twice.

Following this you would complete the usual steps as per the above guide to mark the payment as paid and the finalised Staff Payment will reflect the adjustment.

Staff Payment Reports and Exports

To learn more about your export and reporting options for Staff Payments, head to our user guide article through this link here that outlines these options.