NZ Payroll - Filter Payroll Reports by Tracking Category
The problem:
Xero Payroll does not currently allow reporting by Tracking Categories (e.g. by location, cost centre, or department). While Tracking can be applied to invoices and expenses, payroll reports (Pay Runs, Pay History, Payroll Activity, etc.) cannot be grouped or filtered in the same way.
For businesses with multiple locations under a single entity, this means payroll costs cannot be easily allocated to the correct branch. At present, the only workaround is to export payroll reports to Excel and manually tag employees, or rely on journal postings into the P&L.
What’s already set up
Employees can already be allocated to a group, location, or category in their employment information.
Payroll journals post to the General Ledger, but this doesn’t automatically pick up the employee’s group.
The structure already exists in Xero (Tracking Categories and Employee Groups) but payroll reporting doesn’t leverage it.
The opportunity:
If Payroll reporting allowed filtering or grouping by Tracking Category or Employee Group:
Businesses with multiple locations could instantly see payroll costs per location without manual exports.
This would make P&L by Tracking far more accurate and remove the need for rework each pay run.
It would align payroll reporting with how invoices/expenses already support Tracking.
It would help multi-site businesses establish their true wage % per location — a critical metric.
Suggested solution
Add the option to select a Tracking Category for each employee in Payroll Settings.
Enable Payroll Reports (Payroll Activity, Pay History, etc.) to be filtered or grouped by that category.
Ensure payroll journals automatically pick up the assigned category per employee.
Impact
This would be a huge time-saver for any business with multiple locations, cost centres, or departments. It would give a true picture of labour costs per unit without the need for spreadsheets or third-party apps.
Timothy Belcher
shared this idea
Hey Timothy! It's great to see ideas like this from the community, thank you for posting it. After reviewing your suggestion for filtering payroll reports by tracking category, we've now made it visible so it can gain support from other community members. Community members can now add their votes and comment on how your suggestion would help them. 🙂
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Timothy Belcher
commented
New Zealand Payroll totals by employee groups,
My employee groups are based on my business locations. I want to know at a glance how much I have spent on payroll.
How easy would it be to simply have a report by employee group.
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Jenni Parkinson
commented
Definitely a must, especially when it trying to reconcile the P&L by tracking categories and the wages are not aligning per category. Extremely time consuming to get to the bottom of any issues.
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Danielle Power
commented
In full support of Timothy's post. I find it frustrating that the profit and loss tracking category report is able to produce a total wages amount (clearly there is the data that sits behind this number) but no report or drill down option to work out which employees or payroll entries make up this amount. Instead as a xero user our only option is to manually run another report / payroll report based on tracking category on hours only / and a manual calculation is the only way we can then show our managers any type of support on this figure.
Xero this has to be a feature or report you can easily provide access or change given the total amount is found in your report already.