Single Touch Payroll Australia

xml, yes. More specifically xbrl global ledger format (hint hint). See here

Regards
Harry

I reckon LodgeIT is providing its STP lodgement form for free according to its owner - Andrew

Indeed it is listed as free on the ATO site.
But looks like marketing spin to me as their pricing doesn’t look free in practice. They are also closely associated with Quickboooks

Yes I have spoken to Andrew, he said would be free for individuals but on a fee basis for accounting firms.

The ATO did a webcast on STP recently. If you have the time to watch it (link below), a must see IMHO…

# How to transition to Single Touch Payroll for small employers

Date: 5 March 2019 Time: 10:00 am (Australia/Brisbane UTC+10:00) Duration: 01:30

This webcast was for small employers and their registered agents. It provides detail around transition options and how the ATO will help small employers move to Single Touch Payroll reporting.

The latest version (19.5.39) is able to produce PAYG payment summary - individual non-business report. This means Manager has the data required for STP submission.

@maryeodea et.al.
If anyone is still wondering why STP has been forced onto us in Oz, I got the answer (finally) browsing the parliament papers. [download here]

Basically it was introduced so govt & ATO could early identify businesses / employers not complying with Superannuation Guarantee payments. Also it will identify and reduce the instance of “Phoenixing”.

Illegal phoenix activity is when a new company is created to continue the business of a company that has been deliberately liquidated to avoid paying its debts, including taxes, creditors and employee entitlements.

The govt paper also highlights payslips and the info displayed on them for employees to view. In this regard Manager’s payslips we send to workers are not compliant with current law and badly need redesigning, else they are no longer useful to Australian businesses.

Cheers!
Harry

As far as I understand this, the recommendation of committee is that businesses should be required to state on payslips actual superannuation amount paid (rather than just accrued).

If that’s the case - it’s not just Manager - is there any software which actually does this as of now?

Yes, just one example is E-PayDay as seen below on screenshot of payslip:SG%20E-PayDay

@lubos

My current Quickbooks does. Here’s a recent payslip showing the layout and required info (some altered by me to protect sensitive data).

I believe all the software on the ATO STP site have to be (compliant) to gain accreditation. I also know the freeaccountingsoftware desktop version is compliant (has been since abt 2014).

Cheers!

Harry

Alright. I think it’s a good idea to keep track of balance for contributions by employee. Not just for Australia but for every country.

I definitely want to show payments on payslips because Manager already has this information - it’s just a matter of showing it on payslip. So this will happen fairly soon. As for payments to 3rd-parties on behalf of the employee (such as super) - Manager doesn’t have this information so payroll will need to evolve to accommodate for this.

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Not sure if this is what you mean but for example:
We use payroll software to track employee accruals but pay super contributions in a process separate to the software. We run the super report at the end of the quarter and use this information to pay the ATO, then go back into the payroll software and manually mark the super as PAID. (The employee can then check this YTD information from their payslip against their super account to ensure the employer is doing what they say they are doing.)
Is there no reason Manager couldn’t do this?

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That’s very convoluted workflow. In double-entry accounting system there is no place for manually marking anything as “PAID” because system should know whether something is paid or not.

In this case, what needs to be done, every contribution should be a control account with sub-accounts being employees.

When you actually pay super, you’d allocate the payment transaction to control account / employee and this way Manager would know how much super has been paid on behalf of each employee.

I have two “Superannuation guarantee” items in the employer contribution drop down list.

I suspect it occurred due to me importing all Australian localisations twice (to incorporate the latest changes).

  • If this is is not intended behaviour, then perhaps it is a minor bug.
  • It would be convenient if there was an add all option when importing country localisations, as I think that would be the most common requirement, so a minor development idea.

I assume the user solution is to go to
Settings → Payslip items
and select the “Find and merge” option for the identified duplicates

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The program should not duplicate a localization import, even if you import it twice. I notice none of the other payslip items were duplicated by your second round of imports. Is it possible you had that item set up separately before the localization import feature was added? Or that you created it manually rather than by import? I just tested and cannot make the program duplicate an import.

Yes.

I have done nothing manually other than import localisation but this was done initially with and early version (I suspect twice as I think I got confused which items I had / or had not selected the first time) and again a couple of days ago. Hopefully it was a rare glitch or Lubos has already fixed it so it wont confuse other users.

The “Find and merge” option rapidly and efficiently fixed it.

Hi team.
Thank you for keeping Manager cost friendly for small businesses.

I am an employer with 7 employees. I have read the lastest few posts above and done an update and imported Australia localisation.

I can see there’s the ability to generate PAYG payment summary for employees now. Just wondering how this helps with the STP requirement? Am I missing something?

Sorry newbie here.

TIA

You are not missing anything. STP has not yet been addressed. That is why this is still in the ideas category.

So from what I understand, STP is supported via Manager now? Is Manager connecting to singletouch.com.au in the backend to submit this information?

I’m confused…

Thanks

No and no.

“…should be available by…” is different from “is now available.” When it is available, it will be announced and this topic will be removed from the ideas category. A Guide will also be added with any implementation instructions.