Opera II Payroll Enhancements

Multiple NI Code Change

You can now make more than one change of NI code for an employee during the tax year. This is limited to seven changes of code per employee; the history being maintained on the to-date form. The program reflects this throughout so that end of year reports and other reports cater for the changes.

Weekly pro-rata of Directors

In addition to being able to pro-rata directors who are paid weekly, the program now provides this facility for directors paid monthly, 2-weekly or 4-weekly, if they start part way through the tax year. Additional information is stored so the program knows the date on which the director was appointed and the start week in which the appointment took place.

Audit Log

An audit log is maintained and can be displayed using a new utility command. This logs all the payroll processes that users have been running and identifies who has made changes to key employee payroll fields. The same log is available in the Personnel module.

Advanced Pension Processing

A new option is available to provide an enhanced method of recording and maintaining pension scheme information. With the advanced pension processing in use, you can maintain different pension scheme types using a new Maintenance menu command. These records hold defaults for employee and employer contributions. You can then assign one or more schemes to employees.

One of the major advantages for existing Opera II users is that this new facility overcomes the limitations that required pre-pension deductions to be defined in a specific order. With the new pension scheme facility you can add pre-pension deductions at any time.

You can continue to operate using the existing pension calculation facilities if preferred. The advanced pension processing, calculations and reports are only activated when you choose to use the new option. However, it is important to be aware that once you begin using advanced pension processing, you cannot revert to the previous method.

Withholding of Tax Refunds in a Trade Dispute

At payroll group, employee profile and employee level you can indicate whether employees are in a trade dispute with their employer. Tax refunds, if applicable, are withheld for employees currently in a trade dispute.

Advanced Nominal Dimension

The nominal dimension facilities introduced in Opera II 2.25.00 have been extended to the Payroll. You can assign dimension records to employees using a new Analysis command on the Action menu of the Payroll Processing form. The nominal analysis routine takes care of the assignment of dimensions for those accounts where it is permissible.

For users who are not using Opera II Nominal but have the Payroll configured to use an external nominal ledger, commands on the Maintenance menu are provided for you to maintain a table of dimension codes and descriptions.