I have been reporting STP during the financial year. Do I have to generate payment summaries?

In general, you will not be required to provide your employees with payment summaries for any information you have reported through STP. To clarify, this also means you will not need to lodge a payment summary annual report with the ATO.

Your employees will see information reported through STP via their myGov account. This information will be called an employment income statement. An ATO downloadable factsheet for employees can be accessed here.

Registered agents will also have access to this information through the Tax Agent Portal.

Employees who do not create a myGov account will need to contact the ATO call centre for a copy of the information reported through STP.

When do I have to generate payment summaries?

Any employee payments that were not reported through STP must be included in a payment summary and in a payment summary annual report. So what does this mean? There may be certain scenarios where certain employee payments have not been reported via STP. Some of these include (but are not limited to):

• Employee share schemes
• Reportable Fringe Benefits Tax (RFBT)
• Reportable Employer Super Contributions (RESC) 
• When transitioning from a previous payroll system.

Additionally, if you will not be reporting closely held payees through STP in the 2019–20 financial year, you will need to issue payment summaries to these employees and lodge a payment summary annual report to the ATO.

Reportable Fringe Benefits Tax

Please note that QuickBooks Online Payroll powered by Employment Hero allows users to enter RFBT amount in STP events. This can be done by using an Update Event

Learn how to create and lodge an Update Event

We recommend you use an update event to report RFBT for the applicable employees otherwise you will be required to generate payment summaries for these employees as well as lodge a payment summary annual report with the ATO. 

Reportable Employer Super Contributions

Please note that this payroll software calculates RESC via the pay run if the employee has been set up to automate such calculation. This is done via setting up a recurring deduction through the pay run inclusion functionality.  Additionally, any RESC recorded in a pay run will automatically be reported in STP events. If they have not been recorded in a pay run or set up incorrectly we strongly suggest fixing this and then lodging an update event to ensure RESC is reported correctly. This also eliminates the need to generate payment summaries. 

Transitioning from a previous payroll system

If a business moved to this payroll system during the financial year, was not reporting STP in the previous payroll system and did not being across year-to-date (YTD) values for the employees to QuickBooks Payroll, then payment summaries will need to be generated for the payroll data recorded in the previous payroll system. Payment summaries will need to be generated in the previous payroll system. 

If a business moved to this payroll system during the financial year, was not reporting STP in the previous payroll system and did not bring across year-to-date (YTD) values for terminated employees to this payroll system, then payment summaries will need to be generated for the payroll data recorded in the previous payroll system for terminated employees only.

You can avoid generating payment summaries for the above scenarios by transferring the YTD data for all employees from the previous payroll system to this payroll system and then lodging an update event - this will then report correct YTD data for all employees. Once you complete the finalisation process, you will not be required to generate payment summaries. 

What information do I include when generating payment summaries?

The golden rule here is that you only report information that has not been recorded via an STP event. Otherwise, you will be reporting duplicate data to the ATO.

_{Content sourced from} Employment Hero