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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 mall 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.

PLSL must be reported quarterly- a report showing hours worked and amounts paid to each employee should be available.
We have timesheets which records hours worked, why not a report where we can select just ordinary hours and amounts paid?

Need a report showing total hours worked and amounts paid per employee each quarter to complete a portable long service leave (PLSL) scheme report for about 40 employees.
Current method of accessing this information by selecting each and every employee in the Payroll Summary Report is too time consuming & not efficient.

Xero has always had gaps in the report formats available that don't keep up with expanding user needs and regulatory requirements, old and new.

Compliance reporting for payroll is complex across multiple portable LSL's, Workcover and Payroll Tax with all having different inclusions and exclusions and some vary across states but having to keep downloading multiple reports to Excel to manually collate the correct data is time consuming and open to making mistakes, especially for staff not fully conversant in all the rules.

While some reporting is only required annually, portable LSL is quarterly and even for annual, figures need to be collated periodically to ensure reported estimates are still accurate to avoid penalties and adjust estimates for premium calculations (Workcover).

Come on Xero - please put some effort into what your users are crying out for instead of "cosmetic" improvements which don't help everyday functions.

As of Mid 2026
South Australian Portable Long Service Leave (PLSL) reporting
South Australia has two separate Portable Long Service Leave schemes that Xero payroll doesn't support with dedicated reporting:

Construction industry — bi-monthly employer returns.
Community services sector (new from 1 October 2025) — quarterly employer returns.

Right now there's no way to generate either return from Xero. We have to manually pull the Payroll Activity Summary/Detailed report, extract ordinary wages per eligible employee, and for construction, work out service days by hand (a day is credited for anything worked over 5 hours, plus paid leave, public holidays, RDOs and workers comp up to 2 years). Then we calculate the levy separately in Excel before lodging through the scheme's own portal.
This is the same underlying problem already raised for NSW and Victoria's PLSL schemes, but SA's rates, periods and eligibility rules are different again, so a generic report won't cover us — it needs to be configurable by state/scheme.

Requested: a report, filterable by state and scheme (construction / community services), that totals ordinary wages by employee for the selected period, calculates the applicable levy, and ideally tracks service days for construction. Even a customisable payroll activity report — grouped by employee per period, with tick-box selection of pay categories — would remove most of the manual work.

This affects every SA employer registered under either scheme, and non-compliance carries penalties of up to $10,000 per contravention, so it's not optional reporting we can defer.

This government mandatory report in Australia is a basic requirement that I believe xero should be able to provide. Please make this a priority.

It is mandatory reporting in Australia and fundamental to any payroll program - your competitors do it better