An erotic adventure… No, no, no it’s not. We’re all just payroll lovers and Single Touch Payroll is an initiative by the government that will arouse the senses of many a seasoned payroll person.
Who remembers handwriting all of their employee payment summaries on that special triplicate ATO stationery. It seems like yesterday. Slowly we have evolved with transmission and reporting to the ATO through dot matrix printing, Mag Media, Plain Paper printing and onto File Upload via the business portal.
The ATO is leaping into tomorrow with its Digital Transformation agenda and it includes a very special spot for payroll.
No more actions for filing to the ATO as they’re looking to payroll vendors to advance their software to handle this automatically.
Under Single Touch Payroll, employers’ will automatically report payroll information to the ATO when employees are paid.
This would eliminate the need for employers to report employee-related Pay As You Go Withholding in their activity statements throughout the year and employee payment summaries at the end of the year.
The aim was to be ready by July 2016, however, through consultations with businesses, it has been delayed to 2017.
Work has begun and it is inevitable that this type of real time reporting will be implemented in the not too distant future and employers should start considering their software options in the cloud.
