I don’t know about taking legal action against Novopay. What is that going to achieve?

February 6th, 2013 at 3:04 pm
I am a secondary school teacher. I have not had any missed pays (yet) but have enough colleagues who have. I thought I would double check my kiwi saver today and have found that although I am regularly deducted for this no money has been deposited into my kiwi saver account since sept 15th 2012. Isn’t Novopay just awesome?

gerry, how easy is it to check your kiwisaver a/c?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10863706

Well, it seems NZ Post got their problems with Novapay sorted,but it took a while.

Even it it wasn’t producing any errors, this system would be an unacceptable dog.

I am closely involved in education through various avenues and am by no means overstating any points, as implied by your rather insulting “gasoline on the fire” comment.

I respectfully suggest you do some internet searching around Novopay and discover for yourself the well-documented issues around this sorry saga.

Now in on Waitangi day starting to unravel the reports and work out how much we will need to pay people tomorrow. If you are not sitting in a management position you would not be able to comprehend the level of incompetent reporting and the depth of errors being made by NP. We have a main report – called a SUER (Staff Usage and Expenditure Report). Ours has the totals for the pay period halfway down page 3 of a 14 page report. In the past the reports were 8 pages week in week out – now they have grown to accommodate the convoluted calculations NP deems necessary to report on. But, the report lines do not match the employees payslip, nor do they match the CSV report we also have access to. We used to get the reports emailed every fortnight – now we have to log on every day to have a look if they have been run – frequently the report function is unavailable. As each report is re-run, access to the previous version is deleted from our access, so if you miss checking one day it is likely you will miss a major (or minor) change in costs and payments. We should get 1 x draft, send in corrections, then a final report. This week it was a draft on Thursday, a final on Monday, a revised final Tuesday and according to one helpdesk person we will get a fourth final on Thursday (this info though has been refuted by another helpdesk operator).

We have been charged for teachers who don’t work here, charged for primary teachers (we are secondary), and each time the MoE will charge us an additional $1250 per week which comes off students desks. We have curriculum departments which run on less than this for a whole year.

We have had staff with their PAYE deduction increased by 50% in one pay then back to normal the next, and their Kiwisaver deduction doubled, then back to normal. This happens without us sending any electronic instruction, or paper forms. When we request explanations and corrections we wait (these two events happened before Christmas – to date, no response.

I am on a non-variable salary – but every pay since NP started I have had 1-3c corrections made (notated as “Arrears”). The amount is totally insignificant and who cares?, but when its extrapolated out for 130 staff with 2 or 3 extra lines of data to be checked it does add to the workload.

One teacher this week has 22 lines of data to check – and the teacher worked a standard 14 day fortnight, is permanant, fulltime, on basic teacher salary!

The bottom of reports has notations like:

“entries reflect staff costs that are charged to your school, but may not necessarily be correct. Please review these entries in detail and if in error please raise a Novo31″.

So people get it – to raise a Novo31 requires downloading yet another form (which is updated without warning, and will not processed if its an out of date form – so you have to check everytime), complete the form, scan it/save it, send to Novopay. Wait for a “ticket” number to be returned by email and then wait wait wait. We cannot see progress of the ticket, but have to call NP to get updates. We were meant to have online access to the ticketing process by October – still waiting.

This week I worked Sunday, half of Monday, most of yesterday and now today on NP. The old system required about 2 hours per week. This is a significant change.

Yesterday NP posted this on the website:

“Normal services will resume on Thursday.”

We actually don’t want their “normal services”

Get it?

Business rules are a euphemism for “the system doesn’t work so this is the workaround”.

I’ve seen some hideous business rules in my time.

Correct about the ‘old system’ mentality. There are whole tomes written on change management.

I am relying on the very good will and commitment of the staff to keep doing their work through all this mess. I’m sure a lot of the folk here who find teachers so terrible will be considering how long they would keep working if they weren’t being paid and reflecting that maybe these teachers deserve a lot of credit for their efforts during this rubbish.

penguin whilst not wishing to minimise the distwess and anguish, are you really saying that the majority of schools have faced an “onslaught” or are you just saying that because you want to pour gasoline on the fire? And if you stand by the former, what data can you show us of “the onslaught?”

This possibly explains why this govt is pushing ultra-fast broadband so very hard ironman. Lest the email system become so clogged it get’s like Akld at rush hour.

The novopay interface is awful and not intuitive.

Can you give some examples? A UI is not rocket science, esp a payroll UI given albeit its complex, there are known common variables so it should, you’d think, be a fairly standard set of controls. So how come it’s unintuitive and awful?

I think the Teachers’Unions have been very patient with this.

tvb, really? On my reading they’ve rarked it up at every single possible opportunity, bar none.

The subtlety Alan is that managers in the corporate sector employ them for precisely the same reason except they normally disguise it as commercial exigency (difficult, complex, tight timelines, etc). As if a decent independent contractor couldn’t do it equally well, for half the price. But the shareholders, being ignorant, don’t normally pick up on this particularly wasteful practice, just like the media don’t.