Making Payments via Akahu

Making payments via Akahu is one of the ways you can pay your employees with PayHero. Learn more about paying via Akahu below, or for more information on the options available, see our article: How do I pay my employees?

Paying via Akahu provides a fast and convenient way to pay your staff. With Akahu active, these payments can be made directly to your employees (and any other payees) via an online Account-to-Account transaction.

Activating Payments via Akahu

To start making payments with Akahu, you'll need to connect PayHero with Akahu. You can do so from within PayHero, under Manage > Integrations. You'll also need to ensure you've selected Akahu as your preferred payment method under Manage > Settings > Payroll Settings. 

You can learn more about setting up the Akahu Integration and find answers to commonly asked questions here: Akahu Integration

Paying Wages

After Processing a Pay Run, you'll be prompted with a pop-up screen to complete the Akahu payment process. 

The first step is to confirm the PayHero Two Factor Authentication code of the user who connected the Akahu Integration. The pop up will confirm which user's code is required.

You'll then be prompted to select which of your connected Akahu accounts you'd like to make the payment from. Note that the balances shown in this step are collected at the time you created the draft pay, so may not reflect the exact current balances if any other transactions have been processed since then. 

The next step provides an overview of all payments that will be included in this transaction. Ensure you're happy with the amounts and payees listed before proceeding.

Finally, review the transaction summary, tick the confirmation, and click Pay Now when you're ready to proceed with making your payments.

Until you click the Pay Now button, you can cancel the Akahu payment process at any time if you change your mind. You can restart the Akahu payment from the Payroll > Sent section later.

Alternatively, if you'd prefer not to use Akahu at all for a particular pay run, you could instead use the bank batch files if you'd prefer. You can learn more about this functionality in PayHero through our support article: Making Payments with Bank Batch Files.

Paying Tax

By default, PayHero will include the Tax/PAYE payments owed to the IRD through an Akahu payment, at the same time you process payment for your staff.

If you prefer to manually make your payments to the IRD by the 20th, this setting will need to be turned off. Under your Payroll Settings page, simply untick the checkbox alongside Include Tax in Payments and click Save to disable that setting. 

For pays which have been sent without the Include Tax in Bank Batch setting, you'll find the tax totals owing under Tax > Unpaid. You can then manually pay the amount to IRD, or download a bank batch file for making payment through online banking. Remember to Mark as Paid from the  button once you've processed a tax payment.

Akahu Payment Status

Once a pay has been processed using Akahu you're able to track the status of the payment transactions from the Payroll > Sent section of PayHero via the Payments tab.

There are several stages of an Akahu transaction, and a single pay can reflect any combination of the statuses below for each recipient. These stages each indicate the following and are reflected by the associated icon:

Successful Payment - A green checkbox will appear at the top of the pay, and individual green checks will appear beside each payee. You'll also receive an email notification letting you know the payments were successful.

This means all payments have been successfully processed via Akahu. Some individual payees can have successes, while others have failures - see below for how to retry failed payments. 

Awaiting Approval - A yellow warning will appear at the top of the pay, and a mix of success and warning icons appear beside each payee.

This means the pay was sent in PayHero and processed to Akahu, but some of the payments require approval via Akahu. This may be due to your bank's authorisation settings (this may only occur the first time you try to pay this payee), or due to your Akahu settings. You should receive an email from Akahu prompting you to complete this process. 

Awaiting Payment - A yellow warning will appear at the top of the pay, and no icons appear beside each payee.

This means the pay was sent in PayHero, but the Akahu process was cancelled at the time of sending. This pay could then be processed through Pay Now later, if desired, following the steps under Paying Wages above.

Failed Payment - A red warning checkbox will appear at the top of the pay, and individual red warnings will appear beside each payee whose payment has failed. You'll also receive an email notification letting you know that some or all of your payments have failed.

This means the pay has been sent in PayHero, and the Pay Now function was attempted, but the transaction couldn't be processed by Akahu. Note that a pay could have a mix of successful and failed payments. 

You can try to resend any failed payments via Akahu using the Retry Failed Payments button on the bottom left of the pay.

In the case that the pay contains a mixture of successful and failed payments, the successful transactions will not be reprocessed - only the failed payments will be retried.