Single Touch Payroll – End of Year Process

November 7, 2021

Employers need to ‘Finalise’ their Employees Income Statements (also known as Group Certificates or Payment Summaries) to the ATO by 14/07/21. (Due to Covid, the date has actually been extended to the 31/07/21 but I think it best for all if completed by the 14th)

This will need to be done via your ‘Single Touch Payroll’ enabled software (eg Xero).

Once you have ‘finalised’ and submitted to the ATO’ your employees will be able to see that their payroll information becomes ‘tax ready’ and employees’ tax returns are pre-filled with the information.

If you have any trouble or would like us to finalise and submit to the ATO for you, please do not hesitate to contact us.

How STP and STP Finalisation Works

There is no ability to lodge STP reports through the ATO portal. You lodge your STP reports via your payroll software (eg Xero) which reports directly to the ATO.

Your payroll source of truth is your own payroll system. Make sure your payroll system is correct prior to Finalising. If incorrect you will need to process an unscheduled pay-run in your payroll software to fix any errors.

You can view your lodged STP information via the ATO Business Portal but please don’t try to reconcile your payroll system to this information. The ATO reconciles to your information, not the other way around.

The ATO Business Portal will provide you with a list of files the ATO has received; however it will only show a total of Gross Wages and the PAYGW amounts for each employee based on the last lodged STP report, therefore it is the information in your last STP report that matters, as the ATO will only work off the latest year to date information. The week to week doesn’t matter as such but your last STP report for the financial year does.

In essence, please don’t try to reconcile with what the ATO shows. Fix your system and make sure you are comfortable with your source of truth and the ATO will update their system to match yours.