05.02 New Pay Code Types and Reporting Categories (Australia)

Single touch payroll submissions to the ATO contain more detailed information than was included on the old PAYG Summaries.  As such the PAYG Summary Section does not contain many of the options that will need to be used in STP.

Due to the much larger set of options, we have taken the opportunity to review Pay Code Types, implement a new Reporting Category to replace the old PAYG Summary Section and change how Pay Codes interact with the new Reporting Category field.

Pay Code Type Changes

The main changes to Pay Code Types are:

1. Addition of three new Pay Code Types.
   1. The most significant change for most clients is to split the old Salary Sacrifice Pay Code Type (R) into a pre-tax deductions for non-superannuation items and a new Pay Code Type (U) specifically for salary sacrificed superannuation.
   2. The other two new Pay Code Types are for processing payments and the associated withholding for which Synergetic doesn’t calculate the withholding but which need to be reported via Single Touch Payroll. For example JDPA or Working Holiday Maker. Based on what we know of our clients we don’t anticipate many of our users needing these new codes but they are included for completeness.
2. Change the wording of some Pay Code Type descriptions
3. Reflect regional differences in the descriptions.

The new list of Pay Code Types and their descriptions is:

Note: Code is not seen in the interface, it is included for reference when doing backend queries and reports.

The New Reporting Category Field

The New Reporting Category field replaces the old PAYG Summary Section. 

For clients needing to run a PAYG Summary or EMPDUPE file, Reporting Categories are mapped behind the scene to allow for these processes to run during the transition to STP.

Important things to know about Reporting Categories:

• Reporting Category replaces the old PAYG Summary Section
• All Pay Codes will need to have a Reporting Category selected 
• Only relevant options for Reporting Category are shown based on the Pay Code Type and the country.

• • For example if an Australian client user is adding a Pay Code with a Pay Code Type of ‘Normal Pay’ they would not see non-relevant Reporting Categories such as Union Fees or any of the NZ specific codes.
  • Similarly, a New Zealand client user would only see relevant IRD reporting sections based on the Pay Code Type.
• When selecting a Pay Code Type, the Reporting Category will be set to a default value based on what we anticipate is the most common options for that pay code type.  
• The upgrade to V69 will attempt to set Reporting Category values but they will need to be reviewed before reporting through STP and whenever a user creates a new pay code.
• Important notes with Salary Sacrifice pay code types in V68 and the V69 migration
  •  There are now two distinct categories of pre-tax deduction whereas in earlier version there were only one.  When the migration takes place, any Salary Sacrifice pay codes that have a PAYG section of 'Reportable Super Contribution'  will be changed to a 'Superannuation - Salary Sacrifice' pay code type.  If the PAYG section is NOT 'Reportable Super Contribution'  then it will be considered  a 'Deduction - Pre-Tax (non-superannuation)'.
    
    
    

The list of reporting sections for Australian clients will be (wording is based on ATO descriptions):

Reporting Category options for each Pay Code Type. Highlighted reporting section is the default for that pay code type.  When the migration to V69 takes place the default reporting category for that pay code type will  be chosen.