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Rolling out: STP

Aaron Muilne - Aug 19, 2019

At the start of this financial year (2019/2020), the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) have made Single Touch Payroll (STP) reporting mandatory for all businesses (Read our summary of STP). Small and micro-businesses have the current period to start using STP solutions, in light of this change, the team began working in earnest on an update the Payroll module mid-Autumn (read more about the initial update to Payroll).

After some successful testing with the ATO, the STP update was deployed to our first test site on July 8th 2019. With all updates, there is a settling period because end users will process items differently to what the development will anticipate. During this process the team is able to work with the businesses, deepening their understanding of their needs and tailoring Payroll to suite. By doing so, the team is able to match their processes with the processes expected from the ATO when logging a report. Earlier this month, our third installation took place, further widening our pool of information to work with and improve Payroll.

The roll-out has been an opportunity for us to also deploy new and requested features, while also catching and fixing bugs.

New features that have been implemented with Payroll:

  • Super-clearing house utility:
    • The user can nominate a relevant closing date and is able to see outstanding super contributions that need to be reported to a clearing house.
  • Payday employee remittance:
    • The remittance now includes their leave details (i.e. Opening balance, accumulated, taken & closing balance for each leave type).

Improvements and bug fixes:

  • Employee Payday Template:
    • The template has always been the central point to the Payroll system. When a payday is initiated, most details are pre-populated from the template and other employee information. Now, when generating a template for a new employee, more information is pre-filled by the system, drawing on preference setting
  • Scaling:
    • Scaling is a setting that can be toggled in the preferences. It is designed to scale the data entry window to suit the resolution of the monitor. In some cases, certain windows would scale beyond the size of the monitor. This issue has been addressed, removing the need to alternate between scaling being turned on or off for a given task.

While Caroline has been working on the Payroll module, implementing the above and previous changes (read the changes made to Payroll), Paul and Graeme have successfully completed a series of tests that demonstrate that the update to Payroll will communicate with the ATO and deliver all the required information. With the testing completed, the results have been submitted to the ATO for verification.

Initially, while the number of installations are low, feedback has been positive. Payroll has been meeting the diverse range of needs by our customers. Currently, we anticipate that Payroll will be an ATO Certified product by September 1st 2019.

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