The end of the financial year is often filled with dread for those responsible for payroll. It’s the time of year that you draw a line under one year and start the next, hopefully with as little fuss and confusion as possible.
There are often changes that you need to understand that come into effect on July 1. These may include PAYG Withholding, Payroll Tax, FBT or superannuation. In addition this year we have changes proposed by the federal budget that include a temporary budget repair levy, changes to the paid parental leave scheme, changes to tax offsets and a restart program to consider.
The next three blog posts will outline what you need to do to ensure your payroll end of year goes as smoothly as possible.
Before you even start to think about processing your payroll year end you need to make sure the data in your payroll system is up to date.
Payment summaries seem to have a mind of their own, and unless you want to be reprinting them throughout the next 12 months, try to do what is possible now to make sure they get to your employees. If you distribute your payment summaries via an online employee self-service portal that will help, however you should still ensure that your employee details printed on the payment summary are correct.
To take time in early June, or better yet, each month during the year, to check all employee details particularly current addresses. You need to remove any full stops or commas from address fields, so do a thorough check for these. Examples may be ‘St. Georges Terrace’ or ‘Unit 2, 172 Smith St’. All punctuation in address fields must go!
Check your terminated employees have a termination date in your payroll system. Sometimes these can be missed, particularly in organisations that have a high number of casual or seasonal staff.
In your payroll system you may need to ensure that your annual leave entitlements flag is set to carry the entitlement to the next year. This is particularly important if you use an international payroll that may treat annual leave differently for each country.
Once these checks have been made you will be much more prepared to start the process of reconciliation after your last payroll in June.
Tracy Angwin is the founder and managing director of the Australian Payroll Association.
Tracy is the founder and chief executive officer at the Australian Payroll Association and the director of Payroll HQ.
