Casual Employees

Casual Loading

The ATO now requires pay advice to specify when a casual worker's payment includes loading.

To see how to do this please see Pay Advice Comments.

Casual PAYG Tax

PAYG tax must be withheld from casual employees.

As the employer, it is your obligation to withhold a casual employee's PAYG tax during the financial year and forward it to the ATO, even if an employee thinks they are unlikely to earn more than the tax free threshold, or would prefer to have no tax withheld and to then take care of it themselves.

Normal Days Worked at Standard Pay Rates

Normal Days Worked information is entered on the Pay Details page of Employee Maintenance.

When you create leave entries, Marlin uses this information to determine which days in the leave period are work days to calculate the total leave hours to be taken and deducted from the employee’s leave balance. However, most casual employees do not have leave entitlements.

Casual employees without leave entitlements:

• The Normal Days Worked section can therefore be ignored.

Casual employees with leave entitlements:

• Tick the days that the employee usually works.
• If their days vary, you will need to check and possibly modify the Hours To Be Taken when entering leave entries for this employee.

Normal Hours Per Pay (at Standard Rate)?

Enter the total number of hours that a casual employee normally works per week and is paid at their standard rate. Do not include any overtime hours.

Default Casual Earnings Types

The ATO requires any casual loading rates included in a casual employee's payment to be shown on their pay advice.

These casual loading rates are usually 25%.

We therefore recommend that you copy the Standard Hours earnings type to a new one called Standard Hours inc 25% Casual Loading as follows.

You can then select it in the Recurring Earnings section on the Pay Details page in Employee Maintenance.

Casual Overtime Rates

Casual employees are not generally entitled to have casual loading included in their overtime calculations.

If casual loading is included in an employee’s standard pay rate (entered in the Pay Details page in Employee Maintenance), then applying the standard Time & Half or Double Time rates will also include the loading, leading to overpayment.

To prevent overpayments, it is best to add a new overtime earnings type, using the employee’s base rate and excluding the casual loading, for each casual employee who works any overtime.

Casual Leave Entry Issues

No Hours Appear

If you have a casual employee that is entitled to leave and you have created a leave entry that does not appear on the pay run, it is likely due to one or more of the following issues on the Pay Details page of Employee Maintenance:

• No days are ticked in Normal Days Worked At Standard Pay Rate****.
• Casual Rate is selected instead of Standard Hours – Casual (or similar), in the Recurring Earnings section.
• No Hours have been entered in the Recurring Earnings section, meaning there are no standard hours to deduct the leave hour from.

Incorrect Hours

If the leave entry appears on the pay run, but its leave hours are less than the number entered on the leave entry, it is likely due to one of the following issues.

The leave period on the leave entry extends beyond the pay period being paid:

• If necessary, correct the dates on the leave entry and then void and restart the pay run (or click on the Reset to Standard Pay Advice icon to refresh only that employee on the pay run).

The total hours on the leave entry are greater than the standard hours in the Recurring Earnings section (on the Pay Details page of Employee Maintenance):

• This means that there are insufficient standard hours from which to deduct the leave hours.
• Increase the standard hours in the Recurring Earnings section to match the total hours on the leave entry, then void and restart the pay run (or click on the Reset to Standard Pay Advice icon to refresh only that employee).

Casual Superannuation

Like permanent employees, casual employees are generally entitled to superannuation on all of their ordinary time earnings (OTE) but not their overtime.

The superannuation calculation is applied to a casual employee’s base rate plus casual loading.

Employees Under 18

Casual employees under the age of 18 are only entitled to superannuation for weeks where they work 30 hours or more.

Weekly pay runs automatically check the date of birth entered in Employee Maintenance to determine an employee’s age.

If an employee is under 18:

• Marlin will check whether the number of ordinary time earnings (OTE) hours entered for that week are at least 30 before adding superannuation.

If the employee is on a fortnightly or monthly cycle:

• Marlin will not know how many of the entered OTE hours were worked in each week and can not perform this check.
• If the employee worked less than 30 hours for one or more weeks of the pay period, you therefore need to check how many OTE hours were worked each week and manually adjust the superannuation accordingly, before finalising the pay run.

Removing Casual Leave Accruals

If you inadvertently accrued leave for an employee who was not entitled to them, you will need to remove the accrual entitlements and zero the accrued leave balance.

To stop an employee from receiving any further leave accruals, open the employee in Employee Maintenance and go to the Entitlements tab.

Edit each leave entitlement and change the figure in Annual Entitlement (Hours) to zero.

To zero the existing leave accrual balances, please refer to Leave Balance Adjustments.

Casual Weekend Rates

If you have casual employees that are entitled to different rates on the weekends, please refer to the Overtime Rates For Casual Employees section above for instructions on how to set up different rates.