Single Touch Payroll
Single Touch Payroll (STP), is an Australian Government initiative to reduce employers' reporting burdens to government agencies. With STP, you report employees' payroll information each time you pay your employees through STP-enabled software. Payroll information includes:
- salaries and wages
- pay as you go (PAYG) withholding
- superannuation.
In the 2019–20 Budget, the Government announced that Single Touch Payroll (STP) would be expanded to include additional information. The expansion of STP, also known as STP Phase 2, will reduce reporting burden for employers who need to report information about their employees to multiple government agencies. It will also help Services Australia’s customers, who may be your employees, get the right payment at the right time.
There are benefits of STP Phase 2 such as:
- Employers no need to send employees' TFN declarations. Employers still need to keep it with the employee records.
- Reporting closely held payees or for inbound assignees.
- Lump Sum E payment, no need to provide Lump Sum E letters to your employees.
The ATO also shares payroll information in near real-time with Services Australia.
Lodging STP with Integrated Payroll System
If you are using the integrated payroll system, it is really simple to lodge, just few steps as below:
- Generate the required pay run
- Click S.T.P. icon from the application toolbar
- You should see a list of all prepared pay runs and the status of the lodgement
- Click the Lodge icon next to the required pay run
- The lodgement window appears
- Select the M2M credentials and enter the M2M password
- Accept all required agreements
- Click Lodge and confirm lodgement
Yes, you can lodge any missed pay runs without having to lodge in an order, just select the pay run and lodge.
Yes, with the Batch feature, you can lodge multiple pay runs in one go.
If you are using the integrated payroll system, all directors' fees payment will be included even if there are no payroll for those employees. If there are no payroll records for any employee, you must manually create the required STP information.
Lodging STP "Manually Created"
Although it is highly recommended to use the integrated payroll system, you can still create a manual STP and lodge as below:
- Click S.T.P. icon from the application toolbar
- Click New and the single touch payroll report window appears
- Select the pay run date
- Enter the employees' payroll details, or import STP data from an excel file
- Do not forget to add the pay cycle amounts, total gross "W1" and tax withheld "W2"
- Click Save
- Click the Lodge icon
- The lodgement window appears
- Click Lodge and confirm lodgement
Here are the steps involved when lodging a single touch payroll:
- The selected M2M details will be sent to the Authentication server to make sure that this M2M is authorised to lodge on behalf of the business
- If the M2M is authorised, the single touch payroll report will be sent to the ATO, you should see a successful notification when the ATO receives this report
- Although the ATO successfully received the report, the application need to wait for 90 seconds to contact the ATO and collect the validation report
- Once a validation report is collected, the single touch payroll report status will be updated based on the returned validation
- The following represents the possible status that you might see:
- Sent report successfully sent to ATO but no validation report is collected, you don't need to lodge again, all you need is to check for the validation report after couple of hours
- Successful report successfully lodged
- Successful With Warning successfully lodged with warning, check the message log to see the warning type
- Partial Success one or more payees failed to validate while others are successful
- Error report failed the validation, you need to check the message log, correct the report and lodge again
Check the message details tab when there is an error or warning to understand what was the reason for the error or warning
If you have enabled the Enable troubleshooting logging option, you should find couple of log files on your computer's desktop, when you need an assistance from our support staff, make sure to include these file on your email.