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 Single Touch Payroll

Lodging Single Touch Payroll is simple, just few steps as below:

• Access the Payroll from the application menu
• Generate the required pay run
• Click the STP upload button next to the required payroll
• If this is the final pay for the year, select Yes for the final pay for financial year option
• Enter the name of the person making this declaration
• Accept the SBR agreement
• Click Lodge STP Report

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.

Here are the steps involved when lodging a single touch payroll:

1. The single touch payroll report is sent to the ATO, you should see a the word Sent next to the pay run
2. Although the ATO successfully received the report, the application need to wait for up to 15 minutes to contact the ATO and collect the validation report
3. Once a validation report is collected, the single touch payroll report status will be updated based on the returned validation
4. 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