Payroll Data Maintenance
Maintenance of your payroll data should be a regular part of your payroll process already. With STP reporting, you will need to think about the areas of Wagemaster that are important to the STP reporting process, to add to your current maintenance routine.
Because STP reporting is a shift towards continuous reporting and away from the end of year reporting, some maintenance tasks you previously completed as part of your EOY preparation should now become part of your regular payroll process. Some of the areas to think about include:
- Checking OTE and RESC setup, especially when adding employee before tax superannuation contributions.
- Setup of new/edited allowances and deduction allowances for workplace giving to have an appropriate ATO Type, if required.
- Ensure comprehensive and accurate employee information.
- Updates to company details maintenance, particularly contact details, ABN and ATO branch number.
Changes to these parts of the system should be made in a timely way to ensure that you are reporting correct data and values to the ATO. Staying on top of these changes can help reduce the need to correct STP data you have previously reported.
Corrections To Reported Data
- If the correction involves reporting an additional payment that is subject to withholding, it should be corrected in Wagemaster, e.g. by processing a timesheet and paying the employee. This could be as part of the next pay process. The updated employee YTD values are then reported in the next pay event submitted via STP Reporting.
- If the correction involves correcting employee data only or an adjustment to values, where no payment is generated, once again correct the issue first in Wagemaster, e.g. updating the relevant data, or processing a supplementary pay Slip. You can then report the updated data or adjusted values in the next regular pay event or you can report an update event via STP Update.
The ATO Advises That
- Corrections must be reported within 14 days from when you detected an issue.
- However, you may choose to report a correction in the next pay event for an employee, the ATO will accept the late reporting where this is later than 14 days after the issue was detected, e.g. for a monthly employee.
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