Setting up your employees on Virgin Money Super

Meeting your super responsibilities as an employer doesn’t have to be complicated. If you can take some time to understand and set things up properly now, everything will be much easier later.

Contributions explained
Here are a few things to know about setting up your employees’ super and making contributions.

Who's eligible for contributions

By law, you have to take care of your employees by paying super contributions on their behalf.

These contributions:

are usually referred to as Superannuation Guarantee (SG) Contributions

are typically 9.5% of your employee’s salary or ‘ordinary times earnings’ (ordinary hours of work)

could include award payments, bonuses, commission and allowances

Here are some checklists to help you determine when you need to pay SG contributions.

Employees

Do you employ a person on a full-time, part-time or casual basis?

Are they over 18?

Are they paid $450 (before tax) or more in a calendar month?

If you said yes to all, then you need to make a SG contribution. There may be other situations where you are obliged to make super contributions and you should always check your obligations with the ATO (for example, if your employee is under 18 but working more than 30 hours per week, you may be obliged to pay contributions on their behalf).

Contractors

Are you hiring the contractors primarily for their labour?

Are they carrying out the work themselves (ie. not free to engage others)?

If you said yes to all, then you may have to pay their superannuation contributions, even if they quote an Australian Business Number (ABN).

Contributions if you're self-employed

Self-employed people can choose whether or not they would like to pay themselves superannuation. If you’re self-employed, you may want to think about super as a way of saving for your future. In most cases, self-employed people can claim a full tax deduction on contributions made up to age 75.

See the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) website for information on claiming deductions for personal super contributions.

Super may not be at the top of your priority list if you're self-employed but it pays to give it some thought. Putting super money away now could make all the difference to your retirement future.
3 easy steps to set up super for your employees
You can make all your employees’ superannuation payments in one go using a SuperStream compliant payment system either through QuickSuper or your preferred payment system.

Setting them up is easy.

Check their fund of choice

Ask each of your employees if they would like to select Virgin Money Super as their default superannuation fund. If not, simply get your employees preferred/chosen super fund details to input into your SuperStream system.
Give them a standard Super Choice form
Provide all new employees with a Super Choice form. It’s important you provide them with the option to choose their fund within 28 days of commencing employment, with you.

You can start paying superannuation contributions to your default fund if:
- an employee does not choose a fund within 28 days; or
- they haven’t provided all the information you need for their fund of choice.
It’s a good idea to keep records of who they’ve given choice of fund forms to, as well as records of all superannuation transactions, for at least 5 years.
Make payments

Using QuickSuper or your SuperStream compliant system of choice, simply enter your employees details into the system when you make your regular employee super payment. The system allows you to make payments to multiple funds at the same time. Simple.
Your employees choice

It is important your employees get to choose the superannuation fund where their Superannuation Guarantee Contributions are paid. And we hope they choose Virgin Money Super.

If you have a new employee who doesn’t make any choice at the time of starting, you can start making contributions into your business’s nominated default fund – Virgin Money Super.

In selecting your default fund, it's important for you to know that from 1 January 2014, all default funds need to be MySuper compliant to ensure that if your employee does not choose a fund their money will be invested in low-cost and simple super product allowing them to compare funds easily based on cost, investment performance and insurance in the future.

At Virgin Money Super, our MySuper compliant offering is called the Lifestage Tracker®, which makes investments automatically based on an employee’s age. We also have options for people who want to take more control of their investments as well as a range of insurance options. It’s all about making super easy and simple for your employees.

See how our investment and insurance options make things simple.