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      What is a Single Touch Payroll (STP) authority? (Australia)

      At the end of each financial year, you need to authorise Standard Ledger to lodge the final employee Income Statements and to continue providing payroll services. This is a requirement under ATO regulations.

      Single Touch Payroll authorities

      Each year, under ATO regulations we are required to get your signed authority to:

      1. Lodge the final end of financial year Income Statements for your employees into myGov.  This is known as an STP finalisation declaration, and requires your specific acknowledgement of the final payroll numbers to be lodged per employee.  The easiest way to see this is through Xero’s Payroll Employee Summary Report selecting Date Range to “Last Financial Year”; and
      2. Continue to lodge STP payroll on your behalf - this is known as an STP engagement authority.

      Due Dates

      We are required to lodge final STP payroll information with the ATO by:

      • 14 July if you have 20 or more employees; and
      • 31 July if you have 19 or fewer employees.

      We endeavour to complete all our lodgements by around 14 July in any case, subject to your approval.

      Process

      Around 10 July we will send you the two authorities, at the same time, so that you can efficiently approve the final declaration for the prior financial year as well as provide us continuing authority for the year ahead.

      (Rather than asking you to download, sign and return various authority documents ...)

      We will send you an electronic authority through Practice Ignition.  This is the same (proposal) mechanism you use whenever you accept an engagement proposal with Standard Ledger.  We believe that this is the most efficient way for to be able to simply review and approve our authority.

      Good to know

      1. We can only, legally, lodge the final payroll information with the ATO once we have received your signed authority.  Once we have lodged, we will send you a further email confirmation.
      2. If needed, if there are discrepancies to be resolved, we can withhold lodgement on individual employees while lodging the remainder.
      3. Until lodged, any employees going to myGov will see a status of “not tax ready”.  After lodgement, this status changes to “tax ready”.
      4. Here’s an FAQ we’ve put together that can be shared with employees explaining where they can find their Income Statements on myGov https://support.standardledger.co/knowledge/where-do-i-get-my-payment-summary-/-group-certificate

      Of course, if you have questions at any time you can always email them to payroll@standardledger.co.