Payroll export readiness checker
Most failed payroll imports are not a payroll problem — they are a data problem upstream. Nine questions to find out where yours is, before the pay run.
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This checker is a general self-assessment, not payroll or legal advice, and it is not affiliated with Xero or any other payroll provider. A good score does not mean your payroll is compliant with the Holidays Act 2003 — it means your data is in a shape that will import cleanly. Check Employment New Zealand, or take advice, on the underlying calculations. It does not constitute legal, HR, or professional advice and should not be relied on as a substitute for advice specific to your business, workforce, or circumstances.
How ready is your payroll export?
Answer honestly about the last pay run rather than how it is supposed to work.
Your export readiness
Why New Zealand exports break more often
A payroll import needs three things to line up: an employee it can identify, a quantity of hours, and a category to pay them under. New Zealand makes the third one harder than most countries, because there are five distinct leave categories and they are not paid the same way.
Annual holidays are paid at the greater of ordinary weekly pay and average weekly earnings. Sick leave, bereavement leave, alternative holidays and public holidays — BAPS leave — are paid at relevant daily pay, or average daily pay where daily pay varies. A system that exports a single “leave” line gives payroll no way to apply the right rule, so it applies one rule to everything. The result is not a failed import. It is a successful import of the wrong numbers, which is considerably worse.
Alternative holidays are the liability nobody exports
Working a public holiday that would otherwise have been a working day earns a whole paid day off. It does not expire, and any balance is paid out when the person leaves. If it is not tracked as it is earned, it is not in payroll, not in the accounts, and not in anyone’s head — it simply accumulates until someone resigns. Our roster templates carry a separate ALT code for exactly this reason.
Fix the order, not everything at once
If several answers scored badly, there is a natural sequence. Each one makes the next easier:
- Capture hours at source. Everything downstream depends on there being a real record of what was worked, timestamped rather than remembered.
- Add an approval step. Unapproved hours are a claim; approved hours are a record.
- Share one employee identifier between rostering and payroll. This is usually a single afternoon’s work and it removes the most common cause of a failed import outright.
- Split the leave codes into the five New Zealand categories.
- Track alternative holidays as a running balance per employee.
Attempting them in a different order tends not to stick, because steps four and five depend on having reliable hours to attach them to.
Or export approved hours straight to payroll
RosterElf holds the approved hours, the five New Zealand leave categories and a live alternative-day balance per employee, and sends them to payroll without a spreadsheet in between.
Payroll export questions
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In roughly that order: the employee identifier does not match between the two systems, a required column is missing or renamed, dates are in the wrong format, or a leave category in the file does not exist in payroll. Identifier mismatch is the most common by a wide margin, and it is the easiest to fix permanently by adopting one shared employee code.
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Payroll should be the source of truth for rates, and the export should carry hours rather than dollars wherever possible. Holding rates in two systems means maintaining them in two systems, and the failure mode is silent — a rate updated in one place and not the other produces a pay run that looks completely normal and is wrong.
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Yes. Nothing in the questions is Xero-specific — they are about the shape of the data upstream, which is the same problem whichever payroll system receives it. This tool is not affiliated with or endorsed by Xero or any other provider.