End of year finalisation with Single Touch Payroll reporting

This means an employee's pay history has been manually changed in their employee card. This might have occurred if you started using payroll part-way through the payroll year, and you've entered your employees' year-to-date payroll totals in their pay history. In this case, the reports won't match – and this is OK.

Otherwise, it means an employee's pay history has been manually updated in error – usually in an attempt to fix their pay amounts. Instead, you should only ever fix a pay mistake by adjusting the next pay.

Providing you have not processed the first pay for the new payroll year, you'll need to identify which employee this impacts, then fix their pay history.

Undo manual pay history adjustments

1. Compare the Activity Detail and Register Detail reports again to identify affected employees (where the amounts for an employee are different between the reports).

2. Undo the manual changes in the employee's pay history (Card File command centre > Cards List > Employee tab > open the employee's card > Payroll Details tab > Pay History tab > Undo manual changes). More about pay history

3. Once you've undone all manual pay history changes and the reports match, send an update event to the ATO (Payroll > Payroll Reporting > Payroll Reporting Centre > sign in if prompted > Send update event).

4. Check the report status for the update event to make sure it's accepted. This can take a few minutes, especially at busy times like EOFY.

1. Go to the Payroll command centre and click Payroll Reporting.

2. Click Payroll Reporting Centre.

   

3. If prompted, sign in using your MYOB account details (email address and password).

4. Click the the EOFY finalisation tab.

5. Choose the Payroll year.

6. Click YTD verification report.

   

   The report displays as a PDF. Take note of the total salary and wages YTD amount. Here's an example:

   

What am I looking at?

• This report shows the total of all ATO reporting category amounts sent to the ATO for all employees.

• The Reconciliation to Payroll section is not sent to the ATO. It shows total gross wages which you'll also see in the Payroll Summary report in AccountRight. This amount will differ from the total gross wages reported to the ATO, as it doesn’t include Allowances, Foreign Income, ETP components (not ETP Tax), Lump Sum values or any additional reimbursable/employee expenses.

• The ATO Reporting Category section lists the things that have been submitted to the ATO.

• The Total payments (in the ATO Reporting Category section) doesn't include allowances. This amount should be the same as what's shown in your Payroll Summary report in AccountRight, minus any allowances or the other pay components which are listed in the Reconciliation to Payroll section.

• An employee's reportable fringe benefit amounts are reported to the ATO when you finalise, so these won't display on the YTD verification report until after you've completed the finalisation.

1. In AccountRight, go to the Reports menu and choose Index to Reports.

2. Click the Payroll tab on the left.

3. Under Payroll Categories, click the Payroll Summary report.

4. Filter the report to show Year-to-Date for This Year, and dated from 1 July to 30 June.

   

5. Click Display Report and check the YTD total for wages. Here's our example:

   

After you've run the above reports, compare the YTD total wage amounts on both. If they match (like in our example), you're ready to finalise.

If the reports don't match

Here are some things to check.

Check your ATO reporting categories

Make sure you've assigned an ATO reporting category to each of your payroll categories. The easiest way to check if anything is missing is to let AccountRight do it for you.

1. Go to the Payroll command centre and click Payroll Reporting.

2. Click Check Payroll Details.

   

   AccountRight will let you know if there are any payroll categories that need an ATO reporting category assigned—like this example:

   

3. If any payroll categories are listed:

   1. Click the zoom arrow to open the payroll category.

   2. Assign the applicable ATO Reporting Category. For help choosing the right one, see Assign ATO reporting categories for Single Touch Payroll reporting or speak to your accounting advisor.

   3. Click OK.

   4. Back on the Check Payroll Details window, click Check Payroll Details to run the check again.

4. If you add or change the ATO reporting category in a payroll category, send an update event to the ATO (Payroll > Payroll Reporting > Payroll Reporting Centre > sign in if prompted > Send update event).

   Use Find transactions to identify employees who have been paid a specific payroll category during the payroll year (Payroll command centre > Find transactions > Search by Payroll Category > choose the payroll category > enter dates from 1 July to 30 June).

Once all payroll categories are assigned an ATO reporting category, run the YTD verification and Payroll Summary reports again (as we did above) to ensure they match. If they do, you're ready to finalise. Otherwise, check the reported wage values for each employee as shown below to narrow down where your issue might be.

Check reported wage values for individual employees

There are two reports you (or your accounting advisor) can use to check the amounts paid to individual employees for the payroll year.

• In AccountRight, run the  Employee Payroll Register Detail report (Reports menu > Index to Reports > Payroll tab > Register Detail).

• In the Payroll Reporting Centre, click the ellipsis  button for an employee and choose Download report(PDF) or View summary report (PDF). This report shows a summary of all ATO reporting category amounts sent to the ATO for an employee (gross payments, PAYG withholding, allowances, etc.).

 Here's what these reports show:

To ensure the latest year-to-date amounts are sent to the ATO for an employee, you can send an update event to the ATO (Payroll > Payroll Reporting > Payroll Reporting Centre > sign in if prompted > Send update event).

If you process a pay in the new payroll year (e.g. 1 July or later) but the Payment Date is in the previous payroll year (e.g. 30 June or earlier), the ATO will treat the pay as an update event. Even if the pay contains amounts that you're reporting to the ATO, they'll consider it an update event (and not a pay event) because it's related to the previous payroll year.

But don't worry, even though the pay run shows as a $0 update event in the STP reporting centre, the updated year-to-date payroll totals (for last payroll year) for the employees in the pay run will still be reported to the ATO.

Each STP report sent to the ATO includes the employer pay period information and the employee year-to-date (YTD) amounts.

As the ATO doesn't allow you to delete these reports, the Business Portal will show every pay run declared through STP, including ones that you have deleted or reversed in your software.

So, in most cases, if you've made payroll adjustments the Business Portal may not match your STP reports. And that's OK. Just make sure you check year-to-date totals in AccountRight before finalising. See To check year-to-date totals, above.