Accountants, payroll departments and bookkeepers work overtime during the end of financial year to produce payment summary annual report [PSAR] for the businesses. There are several steps to be completed to generate PSAR ready for lodgment which starts from the final payroll run for the financial year.
Pay As You Go Payment Summary or PAYG payment summary or commonly known as Group Certificate can be produced only when the final pay event is completed. The wages and PAYG withheld are reported to Australian Taxation Office [ATO] either monthly or quarterly in the name of Instalment Activity Statement [IAS] or Business Activity Statement [BAS]. Wages and PAYG withheld which are reported to ATO up to the final pay event should be reconciled before generating PAYG payment summary.
PAYG payment summary are produced in quadruplicate, issued to the employee in duplicate, retaining one copy with the payer and the final copy mailed to ATO. The copies of PAYG payment summary should accompany with a summary statement of wages and payg withheld for the full financial year. The summary mailed to ATO is known as PSAR. To eliminate the PAYG payment summary printing, manual data entry and re-keying data into ATO database, ATO encouraged employers to send the PAYG payment summary details in floppy disk, CD or DVD along with PSAR. When the Treasury introduced Standard Business Reporting in Australia, PSAR reporting moved to digital environment.
As the SBR enabled software product, GovReports lodged first digitally enabled PSAR with ATO in July 2011. Since then the perception of looking at the cumbersome year end PSAR preparation and lodgment become a simple and automated job for the concerned professionals. With the success of digitally received PSAR from GovReports, ATO extended and opened the lodgment of PSAR through the portal for employers and tax practitioners from July 2013 and never look back.
Single Touch Payroll is the new payroll reporting regime requiring employers to file and report all their payroll related events to ATO. Single Touch Payroll [STP] commences from July 2018 for the employers with 20 or more employees headcount as on Apr 01, 2018. This STP reporting is one step ahead and abolishes the lodgment of PSAR, when implemented fully.
GovReports is STP compliant and since July 2018, employers start to lodge STP pay events successfully from various file format including Spreadsheet as GovReports accepts payrun event in CSV. It is a blessing for the employers and tax professional who don’t use any payroll software or using a non-compliant STP version of payroll software. GovReports is the compliance reporting and lodgment software, so for those businesses that want to access payroll features, GovReports also has the simple payroll software version – Interactive Accounts Manager which is suitable and helpful to employers/businesses to run pay events and STP reporting. Employers with lesser than 20 employees need to adhere to STP reporting from July 2019 will find GovReports an essential part of their business when it comes to meeting its compliance reporting obligations.
