This guide will assist you through the EOFY Single Touch Payroll (STP) finalisation process.
Before finalising STP you must:
- Process your final pay.
- Check your STP submissions and clear any backlogs. See below for steps on how to do this.
- Review employee and system data i.e. ensure all terminated employees are terminated and have a termination date in their employee profiles and are archived and check all allowances and pay items have been correctly set up under the correct STP reporting labels.
- Complete your reconciliation. If you have not yet reconciled for the current financial year, please refer to the EOFY Reconciliation Guide.
If you are yet to complete the above, please refer to Your EOFY Timeline 2022 article to get yourself ready for the EOFY Single Touch Payroll (STP) finalisation step.
The final step before preparing for the new financial year is to Finalise your STP data and make your employees Tax Ready.
Once you have processed your final pay and have reconciled for the current financial year, when you navigate to Payroll > Single Touch Payroll > STP Finalisation you will see all of your employees paid for the financial year (including any employees who were declined, terminated or archived) ready in the Pending tab for finalisation.
Please note that no employees will display in the Pending tab until the 1st of July. This is when the system will roll over to the next financial year and will be ready for EOFY processing.
Be sure you check out our STP finalisation tips below and our helpful EOFY & STP finalisation webinar.
If you are unable to submit an STP submission because you see a message that says 'Currently in Review in STP finalisation' please see our helpful guide here.
To check your STP submissions and clear your backlog, please refer to the steps below:
- Navigate to Payroll > Single Touch Payroll and review the Require Action tab which will show all your outstanding submissions. If you have an outstanding submission, click View Details to review.
- Review the pay data. Once you are satisfied, click Validate Data to submit to the ATO. This will move the submission into the Submitted tab.
- STP packets in the submitted tab are in a queue with the ATO and will move to the Completed tab once approved.
- If there are any errors with the submission, the STP packet will move into the Errors tab. You can view the error details here in the error tab.
Once you have processed your final pay, completed your reconciliation and submitted all your outstanding STP submissions for the financial year, you're able to select STP Finalisation.
You'll now see each step to be completed in the following tabs:
In Pending, the current financial year should already be selected, however, you can choose the relevant financial year if needed e.g. 2020-2021.
- You will then see a full list of employees paid during the last financial year, this includes all Approved, Terminated, Archived or Declined people that were paid. You can select all employees or filter and process per office code.
- Keep an eye out on the progress bar at the bottom to confirm how many employees you have selected and adjust your page view to see more employees. Once you have selected your employees, select Declare final pay.
- If you import Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) at the end of each year, you can click on the FBT import shortcut link which takes you to the CSV import page. Here you can import your FBT data. Return to Pay> Single Touch Payroll > STP Finalisation and ensure to refresh the page. Please note you will see that you'll need to now submit STP for those employees (otherwise they will appear as a warning in Pending).
In Review, you'll be able to review your employee details and Finalise STP for all employees.
If you would like to review STP data again before finalising click on 'Review' against an employee to see the STP Line Item report for that employee.
Once you have reconciled, you're ready to send the data to the ATO for finalisation 'Finalise STP for all employees'.
To finalise STP for all employees, you will need to do the following:
- Select 'I have reconciled and reviewed my STP for the 2021 - 2022 financial year'
- Select 'Finalise STP for all employees'
Your employees have now been finalised and will move to the 'Finalised' tab and will have a 'Status' 'Waiting for ATO's response'.
Once finalised you can now notify your employees that their pay is finalised. See below for steps on how to notify your employees of their EOFY year data being finalised.
Please note the ATO may take up to 72 hours for the 'Tax ready status' to be updated in myGov. When you first submit your data it will display as 'Waiting for ATO's response', once received and processed on the ATOs end it will show as 'Completed'.
- Through the process of reconciling you may create an STP event (for example where you create a new adjustment). When this occurs the employee that was previously in the Review step will be moved back to Pending. This ensures that you have fully reconciled the data for this employee (by finalising them for review).
- Please note this will also occur if you're in step 3 (finalise) and you make a change to an employee. In both scenarios, you'll need to submit the new STP event.
- Finalise the employee's final pay, review and reconcile and then send the final data to the ATO.
If you do not have any data a message will appear as '0 employees for the financial year'.
You can send an email to notify employees of their EOFY data being finalised by following the below:
- Select Email unnotified employees.
- Select Confirm and send.
Please note that you will not be able to notify previously notified employees.
To view or edit the email content, click on Manage email content which is a shortcut to the communication content template. Here you can edit the content of the email by turning 'Use Default Email Content' off.
