Restaurant Industry Award - November 2021

This article is for users who use the Restaurant Industry Award and require an update from 1st November 2021.

Restaurant Industry Award 2020 - 1 November 2021

Please Note

Please read all the information below prior to commencing the update process. If you apply our update, any customisations to award settings in the Restaurant Industry Award will be overwritten. E.g. Leave Loading in Salary awards, Normal Time, Payrate decimal places, Period Over Time start dates, etc. We recommend your payroll team completes a thorough review of the award as part of your first pay run to ensure your employees are paid correctly.

Please save the Restaurant Industry Award 2020_11_Update.pdl file to your desktop. 

Details Of Changes

The full award can be read from the Fair Work website. 

In June 2021 the FairWork Commission announced a 2.50% increase to the minimum wage.  For the Registered & Licensed Clubs Award this increase comes into effect from 1 November 2021. In accordance with s.286(5) of the Fair Work Act 2009, this determination does not take effect in relation to a particular employee until the start of the employee’s first full pay period that starts on or after 1 November 2021. This means you should not update until you are ready to process the first full pay period in November 2021. If you chose to update prior to finalising a pay which spans October and November, any updated pay rates, allowances and award changes will be applied to all dates within this pay period (e.g. Weekly pay period ending 3/11/2021 runs from Thursday 28th October to Wednesday 3 November 2021 and update applied before processing of this pay, the changes will apply to all dates in this pay cycle – whereas you are only obligated to apply the changes as of the next pay cycle, i.e. PPE 10/11/2021).

More information can be found at the Fair Work website. 

For more information on pay guides, click here. 

As part of the Annual Wage Review 2020-21, Wagemaster has updated all relevant areas of the Restaurant Industry Award 2020 PDL file for use in Wagemaster for the 2021-22 financial year. This update service contains 3 separate items (Allowances, Awards and Pay Rates) which can be updated separately or at the same time.

Summary

Allowances

• Clothing, Equipment & Tools
• Clothing, Equipment & Tools (Weekly)
• Meal Allowance (Taxed)
• Overtime Meal Allowance - Taxed
• Overtime Meal Allowance - Untaxed

Awards

• General > Decimal rounding is now set by default to 2 decimal places
• Loadings > Shift Mon-Thurs (rate increase)
• Loadings > Shift Fri (rate increase)
• Loadings > Shift Sunday (rate increase)
• Split Shift loading (rate increase)
• Payments > Superannuation (contribution increase to 10%, Quarterly Cap $58,920)

Pay Rates

• National Minimum Wage Order increases to each applicable pay classification

For more information on national minimum wage orders, click here.

The updates are detailed below and shown with screenshots should you decide to manually update rather than apply our update.

Important

When completing the update (see screenshot below), you can choose any or all of the following 3 items – Allowances, Awards and Base Pay Rates. By selecting any one or all three options, you will be loading that part of the Modern Award in full. If you have made any manual amendments to the standard award configurations as supplied in Wagemaster, you should be aware the updates will overwrite the customisations you have made to the related configurations in your Wagemaster company file/s. These customisations include award provisions such as ordinary hours and penalty rates, state long service leave accrual rates or leave loading (particularly in salary awards), manual changes to descriptions, amounts and conditions that you have made will be overwritten and replaced with Wagemaster’s standard Modern Award setup as per our interpretation of the Award obtained from Fair Work Australia.

Alternatively, you can keep your customised award configurations and update only the pay rates and allowances by ticking to update Pay Rates and Allowances only. Do not tick Awards when following the update instructions.

It is imperative that for this update to take effect in November 2021, you close and reopen Wagemaster after loading the update file and that after reopening, ensure the PPE date is at a date in November 2021 before checking the changes.

The effective date has been changed to 01/11/2021.

To assist you in determining which items you need to download (if any) the following information is provided (including screenshots) to clearly identify what changes are associated with each option:

Allowances

The following screenshots highlight the changes made to all relevant allowances within the Restaurant Industry Award 2020 PDL file.

Clothing, Equipment & Tools

Clothing, Equipment & Tools (Weekly)

Meal Allowance (Taxed)

Overtime Meal Allowance - Taxed

Overtime Meal Allowance - Untaxed

Notes On Allowances

For STP reporting, allowances that need to be reported as Allowances (and separated from Gross) need to be ticked to Report in STP and the ATO Type set. This has been done for several allowances, but these settings must be checked by you.

More information on allowances, taxation and super can be found on the ATO website.

Awards Update

The following screenshots highlight the changes made to the Casual, Full & Part-Time Awards area within the Restaurant Industry Award 2020 PDL file.

If you are paying employees under any state transitional arrangements, or if you have made manual changes to the awards, you should not download the awards, but make manual changes where applicable. The below award configurations include transitional reductions to Sunday Loadings and Public Holiday Loadings in applicable award configurations.

Casual, Full Time, Part-Time Awards

Loadings > Shift (Mon-Thurs)

Loadings > Shift (Fri)

Loadings>Shift (Sun)

Loadings>Split Shift (Full & Part-Time Awards only)

Additional Items To Check

Payments > Superannuation (All Awards) > Super has increased to 10% and the Quarterly cap increased to $58920 - effective 01/07/2021. 

Please refer to the ATO website for details on ordinary time earnings (OTE) applicable to superannuation contributions.

General > General > Pay Rate Decimal Places

By default, Pay Rate Decimal Places are set to 2.

See FairWork Act 2009 with regards to rounding to 2 decimal places. All FairWork base pay rates are set to 2 decimal places in Wagemaster however where this setting is higher than 2, loadings will pay to the set number of decimal places. To meet with FairWork requirements, consider changing this to 2 decimal places.

Normal > Normal Times > Public Holiday > Minimum Hours

By default, there are no minimum hours set for public holidays in the award configuration provided. Please set this per clauses 32.2 (a):

FT\PT = 4 hours, Casual = 2 hours

Please Note

Consider the impact to your Period Overtime settings if calculating over multiple pay periods. The date entered for Period Start will be removed with the upgrade.

Loadings > Day > Public Holiday > Hours 1 and Loading 1 > Balance
(No value is set for Hours 1 and Loading 1, the Balance is set as per MA00119)

More information on the Restaurant Industry award is available on the Fair Work website.

Please Note

Leave > Long Service – State\Award\Agreement Based Accrual Rate and Conditions

Wagemaster Awards are provided with long service leave accrual rates based on 13 weeks over 15 years.

Please check State\Employer Association\EBA-ECA\FairWork legislation and amend accordingly if your employees are entitled to accrue Long Service Leave at a rate other than 13 weeks over 15 years.

The table below from the Parliament of Australia website sets out the long service leave entitlements for each state and territory.

More information on the Parliament of Australia website. 

Base Pay Rates Update

All Restaurant Industry Award pay rates have been updated in full to match the full Modern Award. If you are paying Transitional Rates or rates other than the award pay rates, you should not download these rates. You will need to update these rates manually.

Pre-Update

1. Backup your Wagemaster Company Files to File Manager - We recommend you take a backup of your Wagemaster company files prior to making any changes to your Wagemaster company files.
2. Updating RIA PDL prior to processing first full pay to be processed in the new Financial Year 2020-21 Wagemaster Reference: Setup > Associations.
3. Save the Restaurant Industry Award 2020_2021-11_Update.pdl file to your desktop or another nominated folder path. 

Update Instructions 

1. From Wagemaster, navigate to Setup > Associations.

2. Select Restaurant Industry Award association icon > Edit and then click on the Internet tab.

3. Within the Internet tab, tick the items that you want to update i.e. Allowances, Awards, and Base Pay Rates. Do not tick Tax Tables & Rebates.

4. Click Update Now. 
   

5. You are now ready to update the selected components for any Restaurant Industry Award associated items in your company file.
6. After clicking Update Now > Next and then Load from Disk File, click on the 3 dots (ellipsis) to navigate to the location (i.e. Desktop >Restaurant Industry Award 2020_2021-11_UPDATE.Pdl file) that you saved.
7. Once you have located the file, select Open > Next > Finish. You should see folders moving across the screen with familiar names of awards in your association.
   

8. You should then close using the close door icon (not the red cross) and select Close in the Edit Association Details box.

9. Repeat this process for each company file.

10.  You are now ready to pay your employees.

11. If you do not have any manual items to transition within your awards then you have completed this task. If you elected to untick Awards during the update process, please ensure the Superannuation Guarantee Quarterly Cap Amount has been changed to $58,920.00 and the contribution % to 10%.

Please Note 
Wagemaster and Agrimaster cannot provide advice relating to the interpretation of these Awards.

Wagemaster and Agrimaster cannot provide clients with business or industrial relations advice.

Wagemaster and Agrimaster do not configure State-based transitional arrangements, these will need to be manually configured.