Single touch payroll ready email format

WHAT IS SINGLE TOUCH PAYROLL? Single Touch Payroll (STP), a more regular and streamlined way of receiving payroll and superannuation data from employers, will be introduced by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) on 1 July 2018. In the world of payroll, this is a big deal. It represents one of the most significant changes by the ATO in many years and Australian businesses will need to ensure they are ready to meet the new obligations. The roll out will happen in two stages. It will firstly become compulsory for ‘substantial employers’, which are businesses with 20 staff or more, from 1 July 2018, and those employing less than 20 staff from 1 July 2019. In the first stage, the ATO requires every business employing 20 staff or more at the 31 March 2018 to be STP compliant. This includes each employee, not just full-time equivalents, as well as casual employees and those on leave. In short, you will meet your obligation by sending the ATO an electronic message at the time employees are paid. That transaction must contain all details of each employee’s gross, tax and net payments as well as superannuation, and lastly, details of new employees and terminations. Employers currently report Pay As You Go (PAYG) withholdings via their Business Activity Statement (BAS) but under the new STP scheme, this information will be submitted to the ATO at each pay event, via your payroll software or payroll service provider. Once fully implemented, STP will negate the need for businesses to produce PAYG Payment Summaries for employees and will provide the ATO with a substantial real-time level of granularity on every payroll transaction across Australia.