As an employer, you are responsible for ensuring that staff paid by salaries or by piece-rates are always paid at least the minimum wage for every hour worked. This can be difficult to manage without the right tools to help you – but PaySauce has a great top up feature to help you do this easily! There are two ways to set up top ups depending on how you’d like recording your employee’s time and payments to work.

Our top ups are designed to help you meet minimum wage requirements.

There are two ways to set up Top Ups in PaySauce. The first is ‘Hourly with Top up’ and the second is ‘PayCard TopUp’.

Hourly Top Up is a simple straightforward option that will calculate an additional payment based on the hours worked and salary payment.

PayCard top ups will be calculated based on the employee’s ordinary salary or piece rates, together with any other regular taxable payments that may be included as part of the employee’s income. The taxable income will calculate with the worked hours recorded on the timesheet, and if the employee requires a top up to get them to the minimum wage it will be automatically applied.

PayCard top up can also be customised for each employee’s employment agreement by choosing alternative rates, such as living wage or by entering a custom rate. This option will suit migrant workers with work visas that require alternative minimum pay rates.

The top up calculation will ignore:

The top up calculation will acknowledge and automatically exclude public holidays hours worked from the timesheet (as these days are paid separately with higher rates).

To get started with setting up either of our top up payments, the employee must first have a timesheet option. This enables them to record their actual hours worked. Timesheet templates are first created in your company settings, and then individual employees can have the option enabled.

The ‘Hourly with Top up’ payment option is specifically designed for an employee who is on a salary but works a variable amount of hours in each pay run (often due to seasonal peaks). This payment type allows you to keeping the employee on a salary but attach a timesheet to calculate top ups if needed.

The ‘Hourly with Top up’ payment is designed specifically to check for minimum wage compliance by checking the hours that employee has worked vs the ordinary pay they are receiving. If that calculation puts them under minimum wage, a payment will be automatically calculated to top them up to minimum wage.

To set up an employee with the ‘Hourly with Top Up’ payment:

In this example, the employee is expected to average 100 hours in each pay period throughout the year (accounting for seasonal highs and lows). Their salary is $62,400 per year. They typically work 10 hour days, and though they don’t work every day of the week, their rostered days off change and therefore the possible work hours for each day are loaded in every day of the work pattern.

To calculate an average number of hours per pay period, take the total number of expected hours over the year (including your seasonal highs and lows) and divide this by the number of pay periods in the year.

To calculate the hourly rate for the salary, take the annual salary and first divide by number of pay periods in the year, then divide again by the number of hours per pay period.

For example, if a salary was agreed at $70,000 and the employee averaged 100 hours per fortnight, we would divide the salary by 26 (for the number of fortnights in the year) which gives us $2,692.31. This is the total per pay period. Then divide again by 100 (based on the average hours per fortnight) to get an hourly rate of $26.92.

This top up option allows you to choose to top up to either minimum wage, living wage or a custom rate. It also allows the top up to be calculated over multiple payments or pick/piece rates (set up as rate x quantity payments).

To use the PayCard top up option, you’ll need your employee to have an hourly rate and timesheet to be set up as ‘zero-rated’. The instructions for creating a zero-rated timesheet are in this article here. If you already have timesheet templates you are using, it is easy to amend your current timesheet set up to make it ‘zero-rated’. Zero-rated simply means the timesheet is just for recording time worked, but has no actual value (i.e. there’s no payment value attached to each hour worked).

You may already be in the payments section if you have just been following the previous steps. If not, go to the Employees section, select the employee you want to create the top up for and then select the ‘Payments’ tab.

Here are some examples of top ups used and how they appear in the pay run.

In this example, you can see that the average hours per period for the employee’s salary payment are set to 100 (they work fortnightly). However they have recorded their actual hours worked as 120 in the period.

You can check the calculation by multiplying the number of hours the employee has worked by minimum wage - in this instance 120 hours x $23.50. PaySauce has calculated that the normal salary payment of $2500 doesn’t meet minimum wage, so has added an automatic top up of $320 for this pay period.

This example also shows an employee who has a salary based on 100 hours per period, but has actually worked 120 hours. You can see the PayCard Top Up looks very similar to the Hourly Top Up, and PaySauce has calculated that $320 needs to be added to the employee’s pay to meet minimum wage.

This PayCard Top Up has been set to meet a custom rate of $25 for each hour worked.

This PayCard Top Up is being used for an employee who is paid on a pick rate. The total of the picking earnings didn’t meet the required hourly rate based on the time worked, so a top up of $620 has been automatically calculated and added to the pay.