One-touch payroll eliminates PSAR

Accountants, payroll departments, and bookkeepers work overtime during the end of the fiscal year to produce an annual pay summary report. [PSAR] for business. There are several steps that must be completed to generate a room-ready PSAR beginning with the last payroll run of the fiscal year.

Pay As You Go payment summary or PAYG payment summary or commonly known as group certificate can only be produced when the final payment event is completed. Wages and PAYG withheld are reported to the Australian Taxation Office [ATO] either monthly or quarterly in the name of the Statement of Activity in Installments [IAS] o Declaration of Commercial Activity [BAS]. Wages and PAYG withheld that are reported to the ATO up to the final pay event must be reconciled before generating the PAYG payment summary.

The PAYG payment summary is produced in quadruplicate, given to the employee in duplicate, retains one copy with the payer, and the final copy is mailed to the ATO. Copies of the PAYG payment summary must be accompanied by a summary statement of wages and payments withheld for the entire financial year. The summary mailed to the ATO is known as the PSAR. To eliminate the printing of the PAYG payment statement, manual data entry and re-entry of data into the ATO database, the ATO encouraged employers to submit the PAYG payment statement details on diskette, CD or DVD along with PSAR. When the Treasury Department introduced standard business reporting in Australia, PSAR reports moved into the digital environment.

As an SBR-enabled software product, GovReports introduced the first digitally enabled PSAR with ATO in July 2011. Since then, the perception of looking at the cumbersome year-end PSAR preparation and accommodation became a simple, automated job for interested professionals. With the success of PSAR received digitally from GovReports, ATO expanded and opened PSAR hosting through the portal for employers and tax professionals since July 2013 and have never looked back.

Single Touch Payroll is the new payroll reporting regime that requires employers to file and report all of their payroll-related events to the ATO. One touch payroll [STP] begins as of July 2018 for employers with 20 or more employees as of April 1, 2018. This STP report goes one step further and eliminates the PSAR filing, when fully implemented.

GovReports is STP compliant, and as of July 2018, employers are successfully submitting STP payment events from various file formats, including spreadsheet, as GovReports accepts payment events in CSV. It’s a boon to employers and tax professionals who don’t use any payroll software or don’t use a non-STP-compliant version of payroll software. GovReports is the compliance reporting and adjustment software, so for those businesses that want access to payroll features, GovReports also has the simple payroll software version: Interactive Account Manager, which is suitable and useful for employers. /companies to run payment events and STP reports. Employers with fewer than 20 employees are required to comply with STP reporting as of July 2019 and will find GovReports an essential part of their business when it comes to meeting their compliance reporting obligations.