If you use Xero Payroll in New Zealand, you may have noticed that what you saw on screen when managing a contractor in Xero was very different to what you saw when managing an employee. To create a consistent look and feel across our platform, we’ve rolled out an updated design of employee profiles.

This not only makes it a seamless experience for you, but also helps newer customers learn how to use Xero. It’s all part of our work to upgrade the technology that underpins our platform, so we can continue our journey to make Xero more visually accessible, and deliver new features faster than ever before (such as improvements to help you more easily comply with the Holidays Act).

Your employee profiles will still have everything you loved in the older version, with a few improvements. Here’s an overview of the changes.

Our latest enhancements to employee profiles

Historical salary and wage details

This is the most popular feature request for Xero Payroll in New Zealand, so we’re thrilled to let you know that the new design will show you a full history of salary and wage information, helping you:

• understand what values were used in previous leave calculations — both entitlements and pay rates
• view the history of employee pay rate changes
• view the history of changes to work hours

Page names and order

We’ve changed some of the page names so it’s clear what they include. For example, we’ve renamed ‘Details’ to ‘Personal details’, and ‘Bank accounts’ to ‘Payment information’. We’ve also reordered a few of the pages, to give you a better experience when setting up a new employee.

Creating new custom pay items

You can now create new pay items for your employees’ directly from the ‘Pay template’ page, rather than having to navigate to ‘Payroll settings’.

Ending employment for contractors

You can now record the end of employment for a contractor without including them in a final pay run. Just go to the ‘Employment information’ page within their profile and select ‘End employment’. Easy!

Improved field validation

We’ve added hints to some fields (for example, reference numbers) to show the acceptable format. If you miss a field or enter an invalid value, you’ll now see a helpful message next to it rather than at the top of the page.

Gender

The ‘Gender’ field has always been optional, but until now you couldn’t clear your selection. Now you can. We know it doesn’t offer many options, but right now, it’s just for your use and doesn’t get included in any reports or government filings. In the future, we may look to update this field.

Not quite ready for the change?

We know the new design may take some getting used to, so if you’re not ready you can always switch back to the old design by clicking the toggle at the top right of the page. However, we’ll be looking to remove the old design and toggle in the month ahead, so we encourage you to check out the new version as soon as you can.

We hope these improvements help you set up new employees and manage their payroll, by making it easier to see what information is needed and quickly create new pay types. As always, we’d love to know what you think, so please feel free to leave a comment or reach out to our support team if you need a hand.