Sunday 21 October 2007

Why you need to Double Check everything that Payroll does

For some reason our payroll department has a hard time getting things right the first time. In the past couple of years I've been emailing a request for making salary sacrifice into my superannuation each year before the new financial year, and each year the change has either been forgotten or that amount taken out of my pay was incorrect. This year there was the added complication of changing from our employer's superannuation fund (BT) to our new SMSF. The first monthly payment (from July) when through to our SMSF bank account with ANZ correctly by the middle of August, but the August contribution didn't arrive in September, and there's been no payment made in October yet either.

I'm sure that payroll will eventually clear things up with BT and the money will flow through to the SMSF bank account, but, in the meantime, we're not receiving any interest on these monthly contributions. As DW and I are both salary sacrificing large amounts into super this year, we miss out on around $22.50 for each month that a monthly contribution is delayed. Not a huge amount, but it would help offset the admin costs of maintaining our SMSF. Our most recent fortnightly pay was processed last Wednesday, and I heard payroll discussing superannuation payment processing at that time. If our contributions for August and September haven't arrived in our ANZ bank account by the middle of next week I'll have to chase it up (again) with payroll.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We have what we call the Rule of Two -- you have to do everything two times ... at least! The payroll department at one of my employers once decided that instead of taking out Maryland taxes, the company would start withholding Kansas income taxes. Maybe it was a simple code entry error, but it took me three pay cycles to get it fixed and I worried that I was going to have file a Kansas return to get that money back, not to mention that my Maryland taxes would be underpaid. But they actually got it all worked out ... finally! So your admonition to double check everything is very good advice!