The changes outlined below will assist you in preparing your payroll system setup prior to the point that you advise ACR that you’re ready to be cutover to Phase 2 reporting:
- The ‘PAYG Payment Summary’ field has been renamed to ‘STP Category’
In support of the new ATO STP requirements the following additional STP Category options for the Transaction type of Income have been created:
- Renamed option from ‘E Lump Sum Amount’ to ‘E Lump Sum Amount – 1Y’
- New options listed include:
- E Lump Sum Amount – 2Y
- W Lump Sum Amount
- O Salary Overtime
- O Salary Bonuses and Commissions
- O Salary Directors Fees
- P Leave Cash Out
- P Leave on Termination
- P Leave Paid Parental
- P Leave Workers Comp
- P Leave Defence
- P Leave Paid Other
Salary Sacrifice
A set of new tick box fields have been created for Salary Sacrifice. This will now enable users to make Salary Sacrifice values reportable to the ATO:
- Reportable Salary Sacrifice
- Superannuation Sacrifice
- Other Benefit Sacrifice
- Report as Reciprocal
The first tick box- ‘Reportable Salary Sacrifice’, is only available when the transaction type is set to Income. Only when this tickbox is True (ticked on) will the other three tick boxes become available.
The next two tick boxes- ‘Superannuation Sacrifice’ and ‘Other Benefit Sacrifice’ are mutually exclusive, meaning you can only have one ticked on at a time.
The last tick box – ‘Report as Reciprocal’ means to report the value in reverse, for example, when a Salary Sacrifice Pay Allocation is added as a negative value it will report to the ATO as a positive value.
When updating the Pay Allocation field called ‘Super Effect’ to the option ‘Super Reciprocal’, the tick boxes will automatically update and lock to the below values.
- Reportable Salary Sacrifice = True
- Superannuation Sacrifice = True
- Other Benefit Sacrifice = False
- Report as Reciprocal = True
When a Payroll batch is accepted, these tick boxes will update the ‘Salary Sacrifice Super’ and ‘Salary Sacrifice Other’ fields within Employee Maintenance Entitlement records.
Please note: On installation, any records that currently have the ‘Super Effect’ set to ‘Super Reciprocal’ will also have the above four tick boxes set automatically.
Understanding what these changes really mean
The latest version of STP from the ATO is focusing on clarifying the Income information provided to them via STP reporting functionality. The ACR team is modifying the system to cater for these new requirements.
For example, a pay without a Salary Sacrifice may look like:
Ordinary Hours 1000
Taxation -162
Settlement to Bank 838
For employees that have any type of Salary Sacrifice, sites will need to review the Pay Allocation used and tick the appropriate Salary Sacrifice options to enable this value to be reported appropriately. ie
- Reportable Salary Sacrifice = True
- Superannuation Sacrifice = True/ False (based on type of sacrifice option)
- Other Benefit Sacrifice = True/ False (based on type of sacrifice option)
- Report as Reciprocal = True
Using the similar above example, using the selected Salary Sacrifice options, the reported values would look along the lines of:
Ordinary Hours 1000
Salary Sacrifice -100
Taxation -128
Settlement to Bank 772
Another change affects the Pay Allocation STP Category field, (previously named Payment Summary) sites will see both the existing and new options available within this field. Whilst it is for sites to determine their own Payroll settings accordingly, we can give examples for using a couple of the new categories.
Example 1, for the normal ‘Annual Leave/Holiday’ Pay allocation, currently the STP category setting would most likely be ‘G Gross Salary’, this field would now likely change to ‘O Paid Leave Other’ description option.
Example 2, an Overtime Pay Allocation, currently this setting would most likely be the ‘G Gross Salary’ option, this field would now likely change to ‘O Salary Overtime’ description option.
There are a number of new Income and Leave description options available now and users may find it easier to have these Pay Allocations set individually to cater for all the new STP Category options.