Experts estimate that additional costs for payroll accounting will be 50 percent. Short-time working should be billed separately.
The Corona short-time work is a good model for companies because they can keep jobs, but the time-consuming billing also causes significant costs for the company. According to calculations by the auditing firm Mazars, the additional expense for Austrian companies in payroll accounting has so far been 65 to 70 million euros and could rise to 100 million euros by the end of June, says Michael Dessulemoustier, partner at Mazars Austria.
“We found that the accounting for short-time work has increased the workload in payroll accounting by around 50 percent,” said Dessulemoustier on Friday to the APA. That is the case because the payroll accounting has to be carried out twice: “The salary must be separated into an aid component, which is financed by the AMS, namely the amount of lost hours, and a real salary component that the company has to bear . “
Elevation
In addition, the company cannot simply estimate whether the employee receives 80, 85 or 90 percent of their net wages, but is obliged to record how many hours lost have actually occurred – for example in the catering industry, which has not closed completely, but in part Offer take-away meals to order.
“Of course, that causes a lot of extra work, and that is already going into the twelfth month. You can see around 50 percent extra work,” says Dessulemoustier. “We have extrapolated what this means for the Austrian economy in view of the number of people registered on short-time work since last March.
We currently come to a value of around 65 to 75 million euros. By the end of June this value can rise to up to 100 million euros. “How complex the topic is can be seen, among other things, from the fact that the Ministry of Labor's short-time working guidelines comprise 146 pages.
software
The billing of short-time working was also a challenge for the manufacturers of payroll software, who had to incorporate the new provisions into their programs. “The distribution between AMS share and salary had to be carried out for each wage type, for example for bonuses, variable salary components, bonuses or payments on account on premiums.”
“We believe that it can be made easier,” says Dessulemoustier. For future similar measures or an extension of short-time work for individual companies, payroll accounting should be carried out as normal and the accounting for the AMS should be handled outside of payroll accounting, so the suggestion. “There was a similar model earlier with the employment bonus for the employment of the long-term unemployed, where the AMS paid 50 percent of the non-wage costs, and that was completely outside of payroll accounting.”
