A common question and according to the Department of Labour the simple answer is No.

However, an employer must keep a record for seven years, of:

• The kind of work the employee does
• the number of hours/days that the employee works
• The wages paid to the employee each pay and the method of calculating those wages
• The nature of the employment agreement

Such information was historically contained within the old Wages Book but now Payroll Software will keep these records.

I guess the reason why most employers provide payslips to their staff is to comply with some of the items above and to reduce the number of queries from staff when they check their bank and find they have received less than what was expected, which is always the case.

Every Payroll Software provider charges some form of Annual Maintenance fee each year with most (except MYOB) including support in this fee.

The Annual Maintenance fee is charged to cover:

• Legislative Changes (a must for payroll software)
• Bug Fixes (which should be the developers cost)
• Support (except for MYOB)
• Development (adding new features and enhancements)

MYOB has commented that their fees are so high to cover the ‘continuous development’ they carry out with their EXO product range.

So, I thought it would be interesting to see how much ‘continuous development’ is happening with MYOB and the IMS Payroll Partner product.

Now for me, development, does not include ‘legislative changes’ as this is a must if the payroll developers wants to sell their product in New Zealand.

In addition, I did ask the question, ‘If a product has been in the market for a long time then there must come a point when everything has been developed, and the only changes will be legislative ones’.  If this is true then you would expect that the IMS product would have minimal development when compared to MYOB as it has been in the market considerably longer.

However, the March 2010 results prove differently.

Both products covered the release of Payroll Giving (legislative) which came into force in January 2010 and apart from other legislative changes, the only ‘development’ I can see from MYOB was the addition of a ‘Contact E-mail field‘.

IMS on the other hand (and this is the more mature product) had 11 (non legislative) changes to their product.

You can view the release notes for March 2010 below.

MYOB_ReleaseNotes_March10

IMS_Release_Notes_v3.60

As a comparison we have also included a copy of Smoothpay’s Release Notes.  Smoothpay provides regular, automated, updates to their software throughout the year.

Smoothpay_Release_notes

As you may be aware the Government is consulting on a range of proposals for improving the way Inland Revenue interacts with tax payers in the future. You can find out more about these proposals and tell IRD what you think at http://ird.govt.nz/makingtaxeasier.

Among the key proposals for employers and businesses are -

• Software that takes care of routine processes. For example, PAYE compliance tasks such as the need to separately file an employer monthly schedule could be managed by software that automatically communicates with Inland Revenue. The software would have an option of providing information to Inland Revenue every pay-day.

The current situation for employers is that they can file the EMS on-line using the Inland Revenue’s ir-File service. This facility is a great improvement on the paper-based filing method but can still be a barrier to small business owners using payroll software systems. Our on-line payroll application FlexiTime provides a simple file download that creates a file on the users computer which can then be uploaded to ir-File.

In contrast FlexiTime also uploads accounts payable invoices to on-line accounting app Xero automatically. The user doesn’t need to have any understanding of downloading and uploading files and they don’t need to log into different systems to achieve this. The magic in the middle is called an Application Programming Interface (API). FlexiTime communicates with Xero in a completely secure manner.

Inland Revenue’s proposal to develop an API for filing payroll related tax information is strongly supported by FlexiTime. We think, in fact, that it’s long overdue.

The Government’s current approach to making life easier for small business is to provide a subsidy of $2 per employee per pay for up to 5 employees. The subsidy is paid to Payroll Intermediaries,  payroll companies that handle the uploading of the EMS file on your behalf.

It doesn’t make sense to have a subsidy paid by tax payers to large companies for basically doing highly manual task that could be done automatically using an Application Programming Interface.  FlexiTime thinks that this subsidy should be abolished and the savings invested into the development of modern interfaces with taxation systems.

Robert Owen
FlexiTime CEO.

MYOB EXO (Milking You’s Our Business) today announced details of their Employer Services Support Plans.

Essentially, Pay Per Call support will no longer be available so if you want support you HAVE to join their Support Plan otherwise your only recourse for support is their Knowledge Base (I wonder where they are going to get the Knowledge to fill this!).

The cost of the Support Plan is 15% of the current retail software cost so if you add this to their Annual Maintenance cost you will be paying on average 75% of the software cost every year to get the SAME LEVEL OF SERVICE that their competition provide as part of their standard Annual Maintenance fee (which vary from 20% to 36%).

The only conclusions one can take from this is:

• MYOB EXO do not want to sell anymore of their products
• MYOB EXO are not that interested in providing support
• MYOB EXO have totally lost touch with their customers
• MYOB EXO will be losing a large number of clients very soon

You can see their announcement HERE!

Interestingly one of MYOB’s Accounting competitors, Moneyworks, have shown that MYOB also charge Accounting clients a 70% cost of ownership, see here.  But their comments regarding Support should be heeded by MYOB.

Support

Can’t see this email? Click here to view online You have received this email on karen@targetpayroll.co.nz as a valued MYOB client. If you would prefer not to receive promotional emails from MYOB NZ Ltd, please send your details in an email with Unsubscribe in the subject line to exo@myob.co.nz . Please note that unless further advised, MYOB will still contact you regarding upgrade and compliance issues relating to your software. For the latest version of the MYOB Privacy Policy, please click here

If so then give MYOB a call and voice your anger.  The person who is trying to sort out a fix (and there are plenty) is Anthony Hamilton at MYOB.  His number is 09 925-3589.