Want a small headache, have a read of Allowances.
Want a really big headache? Don’t Read it!
Honestly, nothing is a important as getting the payroll correct, particularly as we move into the realm of continuous reporting of your payroll to the ATO. Fixing mistakes is possible, nobody is perfect and the system allows for that.
But NOT withholding tax from an allowance when you should have. That’s going to cause the employee problems (they have to pay the tax you didn’t take out) and for you, the employer problems (expect an audit), not to mention your employee now hating you!
The ATO is become increasingly in-tolerant to basic mistakes such as this. If you are not sure, ring the accountant, that’s what you pay them for.
There is now an opportunity to get it right with the implementation of Single Touch Payroll, so please spend the time & review all your employee’s allowances & pay rates.
It’s official, we are now have approval from the ATO to start rolling out Single touch Payroll. This means you will be getting a visit from us very soon to apply the upgrades, do the training, and get you on the STP bandwagon.
It is very important that you spend some time cleaning up your payroll before this occurs. Pay particular attention to Tax File Numbers, birth dates, termination dates as well as the superannuation details.
Please do this early, having to do it whilst we are on-site is going to compress the time available to get your business compliant with the new legislation.
Remember you will not be required to provide payment summaries to your employees, as the ATO will already have the data. So no more Group Certificates.
The ATO will pre-fill individual tax returns with the payroll information.
The ATO will make the payroll information available to employees all year through myGov.
Your BAS statement will be also pre-filled with W1 and W2.
Great news !
We have been approved by the ATO for Single Touch Payroll and are now in the final stages of live testing. So we expect that the roll out to client sites will commence later this month (August 2018).
Legislation for employers with less than 20 staff has passed through parliament and is now law. So everyone from the 1st July 2019 will need to report via STP. For those with more than 20 employees you are currently covered by our ATO exemption until we update your site.
Security requirements of the ATO we are required to use a Secure Sending Provider (SSP) to encrypt the data payload. Unfortunately there is a cost for this and we have to pass this on via another line item on your quarterly support invoice.
The advantage of this system it that you get a web login to be able to see the status of all your transmissions.