“W1 Total salary, wages and other payments” is calculated by Manager in the following Country specific localisations
Business Activity Statement - Simpler
Business Activity Statement - Full
Single Touch Payroll Worksheet
In summary the value reported by Manager is different to that required by Manager because
Manager includes only Payslip earnings item of ‘ATO reporting category’ type ‘Gross payments’
ATO requires inclusion of all payslip earning items except ‘Exempt foreign employment income’
As a result using these Managers localisation for submissions to the ATO will result in the submission of erroneous data unless errors in the localisations are manually corrected by each Manager user.
In more detail
Business Activity Statement
ATO Definition of W1
Include at W1 total gross payments from which you are usually required to withhold amounts. These payments include:
salary, wages, allowances and leave loading paid to employees (including those subsidised by JobKeeper payments)
employment termination payments
payment for unused annual or long service leave
super lump sum
Commonwealth education and training payments.
And categories Manager does not directly support
director fees
salary and allowances paid to office holders (including members of parliament, statutory office holders, defence force members and police officers)
payments made by a labour hire firm to labour hire workers under a labour hire arrangement
payments to religious practitioners
superannuation (super) income stream
attributed personal services income.
Value Manager displays labelled as W1
Payslip earnings item of ‘ATO reporting category’ can have the following values
Gross payments
CDEP payments (Community Development Employment Projects)
Allowance - Car
Allowance - Transport
Allowance - Travel
Allowance - Meals
Allowance - Laundry
Allowance - Other
Lump sum A - Termination
Lump sum A - Redundancy
Lump sum B
Lump sum D
Lump sum E
Exempt foreign employment income
All of these except "Exempt foreign employment income’ must be included in W1 by the ATO definition.
In contrast Manager only includes Payslip earnings item of ‘ATO reporting category’ of type ‘Gross payments’
Single Touch Payroll
ATO Definition of ‘Period W1’
Table 1: Mandatory reporting Labels
A payment to an employee, such as salary or wages
A return to work payment to an individual
A payment for termination of employment
An unused leave payment
A payment of parental leave pay
Manager value displayed labelled as ‘Period W1’
Manager uses the same definition as it uses for the Business Activity Statement reports so again
only includes Payslip earnings item of ‘ATO reporting category’ of type ‘Gross payments’
Exempt foreign employment income is excludes (as is appropriate)
In error all other ‘ATO reporting category’ types are also excluded.
Thinking about it , an alternative solution is for Manager to remove support for Payslip earnings items which can not be reported to the ATO in W1. Then W1 in Manager could include all Payslip earnings items in W1
Which the ATO defines as:
Cannot be reported
Some payments cannot be reported through STP. These include:
payments that are generally not paid through a payroll process
payments made by payers to recipients that are generally not their employees, such as
Services Australia
investment bodies and managed investment funds
purchasers of certain taxable Australian property.
I’m currently experimenting if I can replicate these report transformations using no-coding approach. So rather than writing Liquid markup and HTML, you could define these reports in visual way like custom reports are implemented now.
W1 includes all payslip earning items except ‘Exempt foreign employment income’ However due to Manager limitation this involves loosing drill down of W1
Support to multiple “Other allowance”. The ATO allows up to 4. In this localisation it is set by the hard coded constant “AllowanceOtherMax” but probably best set as a global custom field for the business (as changing it requires changes on the SingleTouch.com.au web site). The “Other allowance description” is taken from the “Payslip Earning Item” “Name”. Drill down on the amount is lost due to Manager group_by limitations. Note this addition enables the Worksheet to be used for Job keeper submissions.
Unused items are optionally hidden for each employee. Configured by the constant “showZero”
The localisation interface does not currently support drill down after “concat” / “or” operator or “group_by”, but later support for both had been hinted at.
I was not sure if loss of drill down on “W1” and “Allowance - Other” (for those who used it) out weighed the gain in correcting the error in “W1” for those who used Payslip earnings item of ‘ATO reporting category’ type other than “Gross payments” or required a specific ATO “Other allowance description”
