XBert Type: Standard
Accounting Software: Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks Online
Country Restriction: Australia only
Risk Type: Payroll Risk
Business Function: Payroll
Overview
This XBert checks your payroll for an employee who was paid ordinary wages for a pay period that ended before their recorded start date. In plain terms, it finds a wage payment that covers time when the person was not yet employed. This is a strong sign of a mis-keyed start date, a duplicated or wrongly assigned employee record, or, in rare cases, a fake employee. Any of these can lead to incorrect pay, incorrect tax, and incorrect Single Touch Payroll reporting to the ATO.
What it does
It scans your completed pay runs. For each wage line, it compares the end of the pay period against the employee's recorded start date. When a line covers a period that finished well before the employee was meant to have started, and the amount is meaningful, the line is flagged for review.
How it works
This XBert raises an alert when an ordinary-wage line covers a pay period that ended more than a short grace window before the employee's recorded start date. It is built to avoid flagging ordinary, legitimate situations:
It allows a short grace window (14 days by default). So an employee who genuinely started part-way through a pay period is not flagged just because the period began a few days before they started.
It ignores back-pay, arrears, leave, annual leave, bonus, commission, lump-sum, adjustment, correction, and retrospective ("retro") pay components, because these can lawfully cover an earlier period of work.
It only considers wage amounts above a sensible minimum, so tiny amounts do not create noise.
If an employee has more than one matching line, it raises a single alert for that employee, using the largest amount.
Only ordinary wages paid for a period that clearly predates the recorded start date will trigger this XBert.
Example/Use Case
Priya Nair is set up in payroll with a recorded start date of 1 May. During a pay run, an ordinary-wage line of $9,750 is processed for Priya, covering a pay period that ended on 24 January — almost 100 days before her recorded start date. There is nothing to suggest this is back-pay or a leave catch-up, so XBert raises this alert. On review, the bookkeeper finds Priya's start date was entered incorrectly: she actually started in January. The start date is corrected so payroll, tax, and ATO reporting all match reality. Had it instead been a duplicate or incorrect employee record, the payment could have been recovered and the record removed before it caused further reporting errors.
Accounting software
This XBert runs on payroll data from Xero, MYOB, and QuickBooks Online.
Which countries it supports
This XBert is available for Australia only.
Processes
Business area: Payroll. To resolve this alert:
Open the flagged employee's record and confirm their recorded start date is correct.
Compare the start date against the pay period shown on the flagged wage line.
If the start date was entered incorrectly, update it to the employee's true start date.
If the wage line was assigned to the wrong employee, reallocate it to the correct person.
If the payment relates to genuine earlier work (such as back-pay or a leave catch-up), confirm it is recorded under the correct pay component so it is treated correctly.
If the employee record is a duplicate or does not represent a real employee, remove or merge the record and arrange recovery of any incorrect payment.
Re-check that your payroll figures and Single Touch Payroll reporting to the ATO are accurate after the correction.
Once corrected, mark the XBert as resolved.