When you moving accounting systems part way through the year the ATO may require you to zero out your STP submission from your old system and capture all your payroll for the full financial year in your new payroll system and report that via STP. This help note explains how to do this in Saasu Online Accounting
1. Employee details and closing payroll balances in your old software.
In your old system find out the financial year-to-date total for each payroll item for each employee. i.e. The total pay, sick leave pay, annual leave pay, SGC Super and other pay items. You may need a report or a copy of their most recent payslip to get this data.
2. Setup employees in Saasu
You will need to setup each employee in Saasu’s payroll area. We need this to capture opening payroll entries in Saasu and so you can start to report STP from Saasu.
- Go to Add > Employee to setup each employee
- When complete run the Employee Details Report to check (reconcile) the employee setup against your old accounting system. Go to Reports > Employee Details
3. Opening payroll balance entries in Saasu
Now we will be adding an opening payroll entry for each employee to capture the year-to-date balances gathered at step 1.
- Go to Add > Payroll
- Set the Pay Date to be the date you are moving accounting software systems (your changeover date)
- Select the employee
- Set the Bank Account to be Asset: Historical Balancing. You aren’t actually paying these employees from your real bank account.
- Set the Summary to be “Opening payroll entry for {employee name}”
- Set the Pay Period to be the entire period from the start of the financial year until your changeover date.
e.g. if your changeover date is 30 Nov 21 set the Pay Period to be 01 Jul 21 to 30 Nov 21 - For the Pay Items listing include a line that represents the year to date amount for every category of pay for the employee in your previous system.
- Save the transaction
- Do not send the payslips to the employee as this payroll entry is designed to capture the balance from your previous system.
4. Reverse STP payroll reports in your old accounting system
- Create a reversing pays (zero out pays) in your old accounting system. This is where you may create a pay with negative amounts such that each pay line is reducing the total for each of these in the system to nil for each employee for this financial year-to-date.
- Submit these reversing pays via STP in your old accounting System to the ATO (if you have been submitting via STP to date).
The intent here is to reduce all the employees pays to nil in your old accounting system from the ATO’s perspective.
Please seek advice for your previous accounting system from their help desk as to how to zero out pays for STP mentioning that you are transitioning to a new accounting system part way through the financial year. - Check this STP report has gone through to the ATO by logging into the ATO portal to verify in the STP area.
5. Running and then Submitting the STP report In Saasu to the ATO
You need to run the STP report, select each pay and submit it to the ATO.
- Follow the Setup Single Touch Payroll guide for Saasu if you haven’t already.
- Go to Reports > Single Touch Payroll (payroll section of the reports menu).
- Select a Regular ATO Pay Event
- Set the From and To date range such that it covers the Pay Date for the pays you entered in Step 3 above.
- Select Manual Pays
- Run the report
- Tick the first pay in the list and click the Upload Icon (cloud with up arrow) to submit it to the ATO.
- Sign into the ATO Portal to check if it has been accepted (allow a few minutes).
- Now you have established it’s working ok repeat for each pay for each employee until all have been submitted.
If you see an error when submitting please act on it’s suggestion or if unclear log a service ticket question from the COG Icon (Settings) in the main menu and click Contact us. Describe the error message and what you did when it appeared.