Quarterly Employment Survey

To help you complete the Stats NZ QES, we’ve made a Report Builder template - however as every company uses Datapay slightly differently, you will need to customise the template in order for it to report on the correct information.

We’ve provided some detailed information below on what you need to do to set this up for your company.

What is the Stats NZ Quarterly Employment Survey? 

The QES is a sample survey of economically significant businesses in New Zealand. It is designed to measure employment levels, the average pre-tax earnings and the hours worked by paid employees. Results from the survey provide a valuable guide to the labour market and general economic conditions within New Zealand. 

How is the data collected? 

Each quarter, businesses from a range of industries and locations are surveyed. Each business is asked to provide details of the number of its full and part-time employees, and the hours and earnings of those employees categorised by gender. The reference period is the pay period ending on or immediately before the 20th of the middle month of each quarter i.e. 20 February, 20 May, 20 August and 20 November.  

More information about the Stats NZ QES can be found here.  

Items to note 

• Employment information is collected at payroll or business level, rather than at location level (except for employee counts).

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  • A ‘Payroll’ for a business may be defined as payrolls of different frequencies (or pay groups) within a business. For example, you might have a weekly pay group for waged employees, a fortnightly pay group for office-based salaried employees, and a monthly pay group for salaried management staff. This would be considered as three separate “payrolls”

  • The good news is that there is flexibility for surveyed businesses to respond in a way that makes the most sense according to how you pay your employees. What is important is that all employees are covered within the overall response.  

• Information for ordinary earnings should not include, bonuses, commissions or any other payments for the pay period e.g. backpay, redundancy, severance pay, retirement. Instead, there will be separate questions within the QES to record this information for these payments. 

• Employment information collected for “another gender” -  Stats NZ expect this category to be used for persons who do not identify as either male or female and has identified themselves as “Gender Diverse” on DataPay.  

What do these changes mean for me? 

To help you generate the data required to complete the Stats NZ QES accurately, we’ve created a template QES report using Report Builder.  

Our QES report summarises employment, hours and earnings details for a company, as at a ‘Time Period’ i.e. the pay period end date of the pay run the QES report is run against. Depending on how you wish to report this information based on your business structure and your period end dates, you may need to run the QES report by ‘Pay Run’ and by individual Pay Group then select the relevant ‘Pay Run’ Period based on the QES guidelines.

The template QES report contains the core information required to help you complete the questionnaire. However, as each company may treat components differently, you will need to customise the report based on the set up of your company. You only need to do this once.    

Setting up your customised QES report 

Step 1: Open the template QES report in Report Builder. If the report is not visible to you, contact the Support Team to get it assigned to your company.

Once assigned to your company, the report will show up in the 'Reports' section.

Open

The template report should look like this: 

Open

Step 2: Change the ‘Search Type’ to be ‘By Pay Run’.  Select a Pay Group and select the Pay Run period that is required.

Once the Template is completed – moving forward you will just need to select the ‘Pay Run’ and Pay Group that you requiring to report on)

Step 3: Determine if your company has allowances that would be classified as a bonus or a commission. If so under the ‘Entities’, click on ‘Attribute Fields’, search for ‘Group A Allowances’.  Drag this field into your ‘Design view as a new column after the ‘Total Earnings column.

 Step 4: :  Right click on the newly added column ‘Group A Allowances’, go into Properties and Rename the ‘Display Name’ to ‘Bonus & Commissions’.  Right click on this column again, select ‘Attribute properties'.  Switch to ‘Specified components’ and select the allowances that need to be included in ‘Bonus and Commissions’.

Step 5: Right click on the row of the new column to add ‘Total’ option for the bonus and commission column

Step 6: Repeat steps 3 - 5 for components classified as 'other allowances' e.g., backpay, redundancy, severance pay, and retirement pay. But rename this to ‘Other Payments.  It is quicker if you pull over all the allowances in bulk and then moving back the ones that have already been selected in the Bonus and Commission Column:

• Click on ‘Specified components’

• Highlighting the first allowance, scroll down to the bottom and using ‘Shift/click’ to highlight all the allowances and move them to the right.

• Move back the Components to the left-hand side that you had pulled over in Step 3.

Step 7: Add a column after the ‘Other Allowances’, call it ‘Total Gross Earnings'.  In the expression: Total Earnings + Bonus and Commissions + Other Allowances.  Format to 2 decimal places

Step 8: Run the report and verify if the displayed values are as expected. The Template process has now been completed.

What else I need to know?

Please note that attribute fields are used in most of the columns in the report. To view the components associated with the attribute selection, right-click on the column and select 'Attribute Properties'.

If 'All' is selected, then any component with that particular attribute assigned will appear in the list.

If ‘specific column is chosen’, then the selected components will be displayed in the right-side box.

You now have your own customised version of the QES report which you can run each time you are required to complete a QES.