Both the Australian Tax Office and the New Zealand IRD are requiring changes to how companies in their respective countries do their tax reporting.
In Australia, the Australian Tax office is implementing Single Touch Payroll which requires the electronic submission of pay details to the tax office on or before an employee's pay date. This takes effect from 1 July 2018 for companies with 20 or more employees.
In New Zealand, the NZ IRD is implementing Payday Reporting which requires the submission of pay details to the IRD within two days of paying an employee. This is mandatory from 1 April 2019.
Both Single Touch Payroll and Payday Reporting introduce restrictions on the sequence of processing within the end of a pay to ensure that pays are submitted correctly and ensure changes/corrections are made as specified by the respective reporting system.
This has implications for how a payroll officer must carry out pay processes in terms of sequencing and implementing correction. Synergetic’s payroll module has always been fairly flexible in the sequencing of end of pay events and in what it allows a payroll officer to correct by reopening a pay posting. Both Australia's Single Touch Payroll and New Zealand's Payday Reporting will reduce some of this flexibility but will provide a more structured pay process.
To support both of these reporting processes, Synergetic V69 introduces a changed end of pay process that will provide a more structured sequence of operations in order to ensure that pays are correctly closed off and not subsequently altered.
For Australian clients it also introduces the ability to send Single Touch Payroll submissions.
A later release will be created to enable the ability for NZ's Payday Reporting submissions to be sent.
As there are now more differences between Australia and New Zealand payroll terminology and processes we have taken the opportunity to make the user's experience reflect their region rather than shared between them. An example of this is that Reporting Categories against a Pay Code (was PAYG Summary Section) now only shows the reporting categories relevant to the user's country.