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Same story all through this thread: hours every quarter rebuilding Xero payroll in Excel for LeavePlus or PLSA. I've built a tool that produces your fund's figures for each worker from Xero, with every number checked against your pay runs. I'm looking for 5 bookkeepers or employers to trial it free on the October–December return. Reply here or email pmajidifard@gmail.com and I'll be in touch.

LeavePlus doesn't allow file upload, can only enter data manually.
As Unpaid Leave hours aren't shown on the Payroll Activity reports (would be helpful if it was), I run a Leave Requests report to Excel for all employees and filter for Unpaid Leave (takes a bit of time).

Karen M, in case you’re still working on the 31 October return: the tool I mentioned is ready and free to use at this stage. It works out the PLSA hours and ordinary pay from the Xero exports. It runs entirely in your browser, so no payroll data is uploaded or stored anywhere, and it even works with the internet switched off. If you’re interested, just email me.
Ivka, thanks, that’s really helpful. Working out weeks worked for casuals from the timesheet report is one of the things the tool does for the SA return, so you’d be welcome to try it too.Free to use at this stage,just email me.

Hi! I've only had to lodge returns for community services in SA and VIC. Both of them had under 5 employees so it wasn't a huge amount of time, but I agree it would be nice to have a report where you can select the employee and which earnings to include in the report based on what the specific schemes requires.
And then I think for SA I needed to report number of weeks an employee worked, which I found tricky for a casual employee - best I could do was manually working it out from timesheet report?
Thanks!

Thanks Karen. When you lodge with LeavePlus, do you key each worker's days and wages into the portal by hand, or can you upload a file? And for the unpaid leave days, do you pull them from the Leave Requests report or from each employee's leave tab?

Hi, both are in LeavePlus (Vic)

Thanks Karen L, the days calculation across part-time staff and unpaid leave sounds like the slow part. Which scheme are those two businesses in?

Karen M, no pressure for this quarter since you're nearly there. If it would help, I'm happy to have something ready for the January return instead.

Thanks Karen, that's a big jump from 1.5-2 hours. I'm working on something for exactly this step and would be happy to let you use it for this quarter's return, free, in exchange for your feedback. It runs in your own browser, so no payroll data is uploaded anywhere. If you're interested, email me at ddlab.dev90@gmail.com and I'll send the details.

Hi Diggler, we were previously using Reckon Hosted and the reporting and entering of details in the portal would take approx 1.5 to 2 hours each quarter with most of the time being spent entering the data. The July-Sept 2026 submission will be our first using Xero. My coworker has created a worksheet using the Payroll Activity Summary for the quarter per employee and manipulated the data to what we need. This has taken 8-10 hours for 80 employees, we haven't started entering the data into the portal which will probably take up to another 2 hours.
I am usually the person doing all the reports and data entry for PLSL. As long as the data can be manipulated to include/remove information, an .xls file would be great - looks like an xls file is used, no sign of a csv on the portal??

I've managed to get Claude to make me a spreadsheet that only uses two reports from Xero. The Payroll Activity Details report and the Employee Remuneration report. I export those into a excel template that is on my desktop for privacy and it calculates what I need based on the settings for pay items and employee groups (this is so that I can exclude some employees who are admin/directors etc). It worked well for the September quarter and I'd love a way of sharing this as an add on to Xero somehow.

Hi Diggler, the most time consuming part is printing individual reports for each employee, transferring the correct wage info into a spreadsheet, calculating the number of days across fulltime and multiple parttime employees and unpaid leave.

The longer timeframe is for more employees with varied work arrangements and going back over the 3month period for accuracy.

I do this for 2 businesses I work for as a bookkeeper.

Thanks Karen, that's really clear. When you entered it into the portal by hand for around 80 staff, roughly how long did a quarter take, and is that you or a bookkeeper doing it? And is it the Victorian portal's CSV upload you'd want the file in?

We report to the Portable Long Service Leave Authority for the Cleaning industry in Victoria, we have approx 80 employees. If a report contained the total hours and total amount paid for each pay item within a selected time period it would assist significantly. Also have the option to select any and every pay item we have created in Xero for this report. I have previously manually entered the data into the PLSL portal so an uploadable file would be handy if it was available.

We also require public holidays (not worked) to be included in these reportable hours.

I agree with Joey Lehrer's comment - The main report customisation needed is a payroll report that gives total hours and total pay for each employee, but that you can toggle individual pay items to be included or not.

Thanks Karen and Lindy, that’s really useful. Karen, in the 1.25-hour one, which part eats the time: pulling the reports out of Xero, or working out which pay items and unpaid days to exclude? And do either of you lodge these for other businesses as well, or only your own?

Hi Diggler, each state has it's own fund for the construction industry (LeavePlus in Vic) each with their own reporting requirements and portal and there is also a national Portable Long Service Benefits Scheme which covers cleaning, security, community service industries which is different again (I don't use that one).

I work for 2 small businesses that are part of LeavePlus and quarterly reporting involves running a Payroll Activity Summary for each employee (some are excluded such as admin) and then manually calculating the correct wage amount (some pay items are excluded such as OT and some allowances) and also the days worked if there is unpaid leave which is excluded.
One isn't too complicated so about 45 mins and the other is more employees and varied working hours (part time) so use a spreadsheet and takes about 1.25 hrs.

The main report customisation needed is a payroll report that gives total hours and total pay for each employee, but that you can toggle individual pay items to be included or not.

QLeave -
employees - it varies from quarter to quarter 5-30
As I'm new to Xero it takes me a little while to find the right report to manipulate. I haven't found an easy way yet.

I’m a developer looking into this. For those lodging portable LSL returns each quarter: which scheme do you report to, roughly how many workers, and how long does building the return from Xero take today? Has anyone tried a tool for it?

Reading back through this thread, the same three problems come up: working out which pay items count as ordinary wages, matching payroll workers to the scheme's registered list, and getting
the file into the format the portal will accept. The rules differ by state, which is why one report wouldn't solve it anyway — the same quarter of payroll produces different ordinary wages in NSW and Qld, because Qld counts most allowances and NSW excludes travel and meal.

I've been building the calculation part of this as a browser tool — nothing uploaded, it reads your export locally. NSW and Qld rules and levies are working; the portal file formats are what I'm stuck on, because the schemes reject files whose format has changed and I can't get blank templates out of them.

If you lodge these: which scheme, and roughly how long does a quarter take you? That's what I'd most like to know. Happy to share what I've worked out about the classification rules either way — there's no good public summary of them anywhere I've found.

Portable LSL has been another headache lately. Not sure why Xero is so reluctant to deliver what matters to accountants.

The other day, I requested Xero's representative for a solution (or any workaround), I was advised on the detailed steps on how to pay bills - I could not stop laughing.