Timesheets for employees added to Payroll (Australia)
Today is payroll release day! Always my favourite part of the job.
Timesheets for employees has been an anticipated feature for quite some time now, and we’re excited to be able to turn this on for all Australian payroll users today. There are now more than 60,000 employees being paid through Payroll in Xero. Many of these already have access to the Employee Portal, allowing them to view their details, apply for leave and submit expense claims. Folding Timesheets into the Employee Portal is another big step towards bringing accounting out of the back office.
Timesheets for employees allow staff to enter their own hours and submit them for approval by appointed managers. This is a good timesaver for administrators and an easy job for staff to do on their way to work or during some down time. Approved timesheets are then passed on to administrators for payroll processing.
See how it works in this video:
A lot of the feedback we’ve received from users is that many timesheets are the same or similar from week to week or month to month. So we’ve introduced timesheet templates for both employees and administrators. Simply save a timesheet as a template one week and load it the following week with all the details copied over. Just make any tweaks and it’s ready to submit – cool eh!
This is the last payroll release for this year, but there are many exciting features that we’ve already put in the pot and started cooking for our next few releases in 2013. At the top of the list is a complete redesign of our reports including a rethink of all the reports that we offer for payroll related information.
We’re also working steadily towards the death of the draft payroll invoice as well as some cool things like bonus tax calculation and automated TFN declaration lodgement. Make sure you let us know about your ideas for reports or any other aspect of payroll.
To get a comprehensive rundown of the latest features make sure you check out our free webinars for partners and customers running next week.
Read more about Business
49 comments
Well done Xero Team. You are the best!
gary
would be good if timesheets could be entered in on project and activity basis.
Peter Dee
Looks amazing… pity its not available for NZ customers ;(
Very happy with the update……… if we could just get a app for that for the iPhone!
Yes, fantastic stuff! This is going to be a much used feature for my clients and myself. 
Looks great, nice work team!
Freda Madden
Very disappointed that tracking centres aren’t included in the timesheets – will have to continue to do them manually.
Jennie Smith
Great feature! Bit worried though. When you get rid of the draft invoice, where will we be able to put in the tracking/jobs for a payrun. Can you just add tracking to timesheets for me please. Could you also get WFM to input timesheets into Xero.
Just need it for NZ now please… Great work Xero
Nice one Xero, I’ll be looking with interest.
For my team, the toggl.com timesheet software is very good –– its ‘reporting and bookmark’ features allow timesheets to be sent to clients in a very transparent manner.
This would be essential for us to consider swapping, and an API to hook into.
Nice work however – and keep us updated with the Roadmap. We’re happy Xero users thus far!
Dianne Anderson
Please let me know if you can do bank feeds through the Bendigo Bank.
Julie Low
Was quite excited by the news until I found that there is no option to include more details such as job tracking. Perhaps even splitting up times per day, rather than total hours per day. This is great for straight forward timesheets where it is not necessary to know what was done just h ow long the employee worked, so well done to get that up and running. I look forward to the next level.
Lynda
Looks good, but is there an option to change the duration of the timesheet, for example fortnightly or monthly?
Alex White
Looks good. Are you likely to implement start and end times? To calculate hours…
Does the program incorporate allocating time to projects and billing it? If not, can you advise an add on that does this. I see there are several addons in this space, but I am not sure which to use.
Paul Jordan
As good as the time sheets are, I can’t use them until activity and project tracking are available.
Do the time sheets integrate with Work Flow Max time sheets?
We use WFM, it would be great if the time was brought across into Xero and also the other way round.
Hi @Dianne – we have a feed available from Bendigo through our integration with Yodlee.
Vic Cherikoff
Nice to have. Still waiting for some more basic features such as purchase orders as a dedicated item rather than an accounts payable invoice that you can’t email to the supplier.
Jodie Taranto
We use WFM because we need to bill time to our clients by projects from staff timesheets. We would require the same functionality within Xero please
Be great also that if they added a day leave within timesheet – that this would reflect over into the Leave tab for approval from their manager.
Thank you.
Glad you are adding payroll functionality, however it is not useful to us as per other comments. We would require:
1. Automatic hours calculation via start, end and break times
2. Ability to add leave into the timesheet itself.
3. Leave to be calculated in hours not days
4. Facility for time in lieu
5. Automatic default to the correct pay rate
Look forward to hearing about newer versions.
Amanda Treloar
Great saves a lot of time!
Adam
Argh! My ears!
Akagrp
Great work guys, you keep validating reasons to love xero
Re reports would love a future leave projection report and automated leave provisions to balance sheet
Looking forward to using it with our Aussie customers. Thanks for update Xero.
Tim
This would be great to have in NZ. Are there any plans to make it available to us?
Nicola Smith
Agree that it “would be good if timesheets could be entered in on project and activity basis” and that it linked through to invoice prep.
Cathy
Just wondering whether you will be releasing payroll and timesheets to New Zealand. Am more interested in the timesheet function
Peter Larter
I concur with Siesta. I was very excited about this development – however, without time in lieu functionality, the timesheet section won’t be useful for us or other businesses that employ people part-time or full-time on fixed wages.
We really look forward to additional features before we would use it. Nevertheless it will be nice to let employees have their own portal to look at past pay details, leave balances etc.
Great stuff! It will be a much used feature for my clients and me. Thank you
Andy Poulsen
@Stuart I really hope you guys are listening to your dedicated NZ clients that would love to be able to use the Payroll and Time sheet modules in their organisations. Doing Payroll manually to be able to enter it into Xero is a huge pain for small businesses and having to use other products to calculate your payroll is a hassle. Why not do the work and port the Australian modules to the NZ systems and update the tax tables accordingly, surely that shouldn’t be too complex?? And it would give you another strong addition to the existing suite.
Hi Andy, we’ve got some great New Zealand partners who have provided web payroll even before Xero came along. They have been big supporters.
Right now we’re focussed on continuing to execute payroll in Australia and beginning work on the USA version. In time we might look at New Zealand payroll but there are no current plans.
Eldose
Hi Rod, any possibility of bringing payroll to users in “no tax” countries like the UAE sooner?
Selina
It is a great new function! Well done!
It will be useful to our business if there is a choice for project listing and activities; so it will be great to track time on projects.
Owaat
Find this feature very basic and not well thought out. As other have mentioned this is only useful for organisations will very very basic payroll items. Employees don’t want to have to work out penalties and whether or not they are awarded allowances. An employee wants to enter start time, lunch period and finish time.
A good start BUT for real value add for ALL users we also need this:
1. Automatic hours calculation via start, end and break times 2. Ability to add leave into the timesheet itself. 3. Leave to be calculated in hours not days 4. Facility for time in lieu 5. Automatic default to the correct pay rate – SIETA MADE THESE RECOMMENDATIONS. Completely agree with her. Checking permanent part time staff calculations on hrs worked is such a drag but it has to be done as errors are so common.
Matthew
When will payroll be available in the UK?
Minghui ZHOU
When will the employee portal be available globally? We’re really impatient to manage all the payroll aspect in one place and let our employees get access to report their leaves etc on their own.
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Fantastic news thank you so much @Stu know my clients will be jumping for joy