The Best Way for Agencies to Sort Nanny Payroll

Busy parents and skilled nannies look to agencies for endorsement, reassurance and support. The mere presence of a third party acts as a crucial comfort for them.

Nanny agencies make the magic happen, ironing out all the tricky logistics and formalities along the way. Imagine if your nanny agency had its own end-to-end nanny payroll department: a bolt-on service that completed the circle.

Find out about the benefits of teaming up with a nanny payroll specialist as we weigh up the positive impact it could have on your business and your customers.

What is Nanny Payroll?

Essentially, nanny payroll covers everything related to a nanny’s salary. This includes:

• Generating payslips
• Calculating and paying taxes to the ATO
• Keeping track of holiday and sick leave
• Ensuring Single Touch Payroll compliance
• Understanding and paying Super and Workers’ Comp
• Completing the necessary paperwork at the start and end of a contract

All this has to come with the expertise and experience needed to ensure compliance is watertight. It’s a big ask because the required skill-set is arguably very niche.

The Complexities of Administering Payroll

So, what are some of the trickier areas around payroll? Some of the rules around Workers’ Comp, for example, vary between states and territories. There are also dependencies on the payment of Super related to the number of hours worked.

There’s a requirement to understand how the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Award system works. It’s important to know how it applies to nannies along with some of the complexities that can come with using a contractor.

There can be further dependencies related to whether you employ a nanny on a full or part-time basis. Some families may also want their nanny to live in. That in itself creates another level of tax complexities that will need sorting out.

Nanny Allowances

There may also be particular allowances that your nanny may have an entitlement to. These include those related to first aid, meals and driving their own car.

Families may, for instance, need to pay their nanny a per km rate. This can happen if they have an agreement that the nanny uses their own vehicle to run errands, pick up and drop off the kids at school or for extra-curricular activities.

In short, there’s a labyrinth of rules and regulations to steer and navigate your way through. Nannies are employees and, in Australia, workers have significant rights. Some relate to how much we pay them but they also include a whole host of other obligations.

Why Should a Nanny Recruitment Agency Offer Payroll Services?

We believe that nannies and other domestic workers deserve to feel valued. When you get a new job, there’s an expectation that, at the very least, you’re going to get paid properly, professionally and in a way that’s all-compliant.

For many nanny agencies and lots of families, managing the processes involved in nanny payroll is a step too far. It’s time-consuming and fraught with risk. It also requires expertise they either don’t have or lack confidence in.

Rules made by the ATO get updated, tweaked or changed completely on a regular basis. Keeping across regulations and tax rates is essential for a consistently accurate payroll. 

What Are the Nanny Payroll Options?

There are several clear choices related to nanny payroll you can make as an agency. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of the main options available.

1.  Do Nothing

What might appear to be the most straightforward choice is not to offer any kind of payroll service at all. That doesn’t sit very comfortably if you’re striving to provide top-notch customer service.

Nor does it instil confidence. It creates an impression that, as an agency, you don’t particularly care about anything beyond connecting parents with nannies.

Australia has some of the strictest employment laws in the world. It’s not a great look if you decide not to engage in solving issues around nanny payroll. It’s not unreasonable for families and nannies to expect some sense of duty of care from the agency they’ve been working with.

If you choose to do nothing, you are also potentially storing up problems that will surface one way or another further down the line.

If things go wrong with a nanny’s salary, the nanny agency may be first in the firing line no matter how disconnected it is with matters related to payroll.

2.  Take Care of the Payroll Yourself

This is definitely an option but it pays to weigh up whether or not it’s viable from a business perspective. Setting up and managing payroll requires specialist skills and training.

As a nanny agency, you may already have someone to look after the payroll of your own staff. However, the processes involved can be time-consuming, and even more so if you have a lot of families and nannies on your books and decide to take care of the payroll in-house.

Payroll work is likely to need the effort of a small team to make sure everything gets done correctly. The question is whether all that effort could be better spent on other aspects of the business that would generate more income more quickly.

3.  Outsource Your Payroll by Teaming up With an Expert

Using a nanny payroll service allows you to recommend a tried and tested solution that comes at no cost to you. You can propose and endorse a supplier that can provide all these services and more:

• Instantly available online timesheets
• Accurately calculated and generated payslips
• Timely payment of all taxes
• End-to-end payroll management from Super to Workers’ Comp management
• Compliance with ATO and FDO rules
• Management of allowances
• Help and support with employment rights and obligations

Most families have enough on their plates without having to ensure all their payroll boxes get ticked correctly each week. It’s one of the key reasons they chose to employ a nanny at all.

For them, using a payroll service is a small price to pay for the huge benefit it brings in terms of time and effort.

The Key Benefits of Partnering With a Nanny Payroll Service

Outsourcing the payroll admin to a specialist service is a fast and efficient solution. All that unnecessary angst gets removed and replaced with relief that someone else will take care of the payroll detail.

Agencies gain kudos by being able to offer a payroll service on tap. Families and nannies are happy because they see that the agency rightly takes issues around payroll seriously. They can relax knowing that they’re meeting their legal commitments.

Like all other employees, nannies need to feel that the parents they work for value them by paying them correctly and on time. They want reassurance that the families whose kids they look after are on top of their leave, overtime and any sickness entitlements. 

Our range of products helps manage the expectations of everyone. And the cost of all this? Each week, it works out at far less than one day’s spend on a couple of takeaway sandwiches. It’s a small price to pay for the stress it removes.

How Does Pay The Nanny Partner With Agencies?

Teaming up with Pay The Nanny creates a partnership that is of huge mutual benefit. You can relax knowing that by recommending us, your clients will benefit from:

• State-of-the-art payroll software that accurately manages timesheets and leave
• A backup team including CAs and highly qualified financial & taxation specialists
• Electronic payslips that clearly lay out how a salary gets dispersed
• Compliance with rules related to taxes, Super and Workers’ Comp
• Advice on specific allowances for nannies
• Unlimited email and phone support
• One simple and affordable fixed weekly fee for the services

We’re able to offer the same services on a monthly, fortnightly or weekly payroll cycle.

Our Referral Incentive Scheme

Pay The Nanny is also able to offer an attractive referral scheme to agencies. It’s a lucrative source of income for nanny agencies. It quickly grows depending on the number of customers referred by each agency that we take on board.

We pride ourselves on always going the extra mile for our customers. We want families and nannies to feel supported. That’s why we’re always on hand to deal with any queries or last-minute changes.

Nanny payroll is what we do. It’s something we deal with day in and day out. This means that, whether it’s help with a new contract, advice on Super or an update on the latest allowances for nannies, we’re across it all.

You can be confident that your customers will be getting an expert service and that their payroll needs are in safe hands.

Make Your Customers Even Happier

We’ve already forged successful relationships with nanny agencies of all shapes and sizes. The positive testimonials speak volumes. We hope you’ll also team up with us and reap all the benefits of recommending us to the nannies and families you look after.

There’s no obligation and we firmly believe that teaming up with us means that everyone’s a winner.

Get in touch with us now to start what we hope will be a long and lasting partnership with Pay The Nanny. We look forward to hearing from you!