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Making adjustments to the amount of Qualifying Earnings 


For a number of reasons such as being late to upgrade, misclassifying pay items, and salary sacrifice to non-superannuation (including salary packaging and fringe benefits), you may need to adjust the year-to-date Qualifying Earnings values being reported from 2026/27. Depending on the nature of the reason, you should review your pay items to ensure they are correctly configured going forward. It is important to note that a change in QE flag of a pay item does not change the QE value for pays that have already been processed against that pay item. The following are the recommended steps to adjust QE from a Sybiz Visipay perspective; any queries associated with under-reporting of QE and the associated failure to meet Payday Super reporting obligations, if applicable, should be directed toward the ATO. 

The Qualifying Earnings value, like all other employee level STP reporting, is year-to-date. QE is derived from the associated pay items at time of processing. 

To make adjustments, you will require two or three pay items, one to adjust the non-QE amount up or down and another to adjust the QE amount up or down. The third pay item is similar to the first, except would be set to Superannuation: Does Not Apply. This pay item would be used where you are not paying superannuation on the amount of salary sacrificed for non-super purposes. For completeness, if you choose to pay superannuation on amounts that are not QE, you can configure pay items to be Superannuation: Does Apply and Qualifying Earning (QE) unchecked.

Pay Item 1 to adjust QE up or down (Pay Item 3, if required is identical except super does not apply): 

Pay Item 2 to adjust non-QE up or down: 

Once the pay items have been created, you can then process a pay with equal and opposite values which will result in QE only being affected. For example, if an employee’s QE was reported as $0 but should have been $1,000, you would process a positive $1,000 to the first pay item and a negative $1,000 to the second pay item.

The example shows a separate pay being used to make an standalone correction, however, the relevant pay items can be added to a regular pay, such as to adjust QE and super for salary sacrifice for non-super purposes. The classification of superannuation as Qualifying Earnings in various salary sacrifice scenarios is summarised below.


With respect to the difference in treatment of the source of salary sacrifice to superannuation, depending on whether it is Qualifying Earnings, Sybiz Visipay will automatically report the correct amount of Qualifying Earnings.

For example, if salary sacrifice is sourced from an overtime pay item (Qualifying Earnings flag unchecked), then the amount of salary sacrificed will not contribute to the Qualifying Earnings amount reported.

Conversely, if salary sacrifice is sourced from a normal time pay item (Qualifying Earnings flag checked), then the amount of salary sacrificed will contribute the the Qualifying Earnings amount reported.

All other things being equal, the amount of QE reported will be identical, irrespective of whether the salary sacrifice to superannuation is sourced from QE or non-QE pay items. QE will also be the same if no salary sacrifice occurred!

The SS column on the pay processing screen signifies whether that pay item is used as a source of salary sacrifice — which is determined by the user when the pay item is added to the payslip (or pay profile) by checking or unchecking the Salary Sacrifice Applies check box.