Single Touch Payroll

See these pages for detailed information about the STP screens:

Single Touch Payroll (STP) is an ATO requirement for reporting payroll data, which allows you to report to the ATO directly from your payroll software at the same time as you pay your employees. STP is required from 1 July 2018 for employers with 20 or more employees, and from 1 July 2019 for employers with 19 or fewer employees. Exo Payroll supports STP reporting, once the system has been set up to use it.

See the Single Touch Payroll section on the ATO website for more information.

About STP Phase 2

As of 1 January 2022, the ATO has expanded STP to include additional information in your payroll reporting. The ATO call this expansion STP Phase 2. To learn more about this change, visit the ATO website.

Exo Employer Services introduced support for STP Phase 2 in version 2021.09.

We've obtained a deferral from the ATO. This means that, because you use an MYOB product, you have until mid-2022 to start reporting via STP Phase 2.

There are many things that won't change under STP Phase 2, like:

how and when you lodge your STP reports
the types of payments you report
your tax and super obligations
end of year finalisation.

Getting ready for STP

Setting up Exo Payroll for STP

Before pay data can be submitted with STP, Exo Payroll must be set up with the necessary details to communicate with the STP service and submit pay data. Setup is performed on the Single Touch Payroll Setup section of the Setup Payroll window. This section has four sub-sections:

General - This is where you enable Single Touch Payroll and choose whether to submit pay data automatically after updating pay, or manually.
Payer - This section contains details of your company, which must be included in the information sent to the ATO.
Intermediary - This section is optional. If your organisation uses an intermediary, e.g. a tax agency who files on your behalf, you can enter their details here. If you do not use an intermediary, there is no need to complete this section.
Software Identifier - This section lets you retrieve a Software ID using an online service. This ID is required when authorising MYOB to submit your pay run data to the ATO (see below).

Authorising MYOB with the ATO

As well as configuring the STP settings in Exo Payroll, you must also authorise MYOB to submit tax documents on behalf of your company via the STP service. On the Single Touch Payroll Setup > Software Identifier section of the Setup Payroll window, click the Get Software Identifier button below to display your unique Software ID, which you will then need to supply to the ATO.

There are two ways you can register the Software ID with the ATO:

By phone - call the ATO on 1300 852 232.
Online:
1. Log in to the ATO's Access Manager website (https://am.ato.gov.au/) and click My hosted SBR software services in the left-hand menu.
2. Click Notify the ATO of your hosted service.
3. Click the ABN link for MYOB AUSTRALIA PTY LTD.
4. Paste or type your Software ID into the Add Software IDs field and click Next.
5. Click Save.

Submitting Pay Data via STP

If the Auto submit STP pay event data to ATO after every pay update option on the Single Touch Payroll Setup > General section of the Setup Payroll window is ticked, data will be submitted automatically after the pay is updated.

If the Auto submit STP pay event data to ATO after every pay update option is not ticked, you can submit via STP on the Single Touch Payroll Submissions window.

In both cases, you must accept a declaration message before submitting the data:

Enter the name of the person responsible for submitting via Single Touch Payroll, tick the declaration check box, then click Send to ATO to submit the data.

Data Verification

Before STP data is submitted to the ATO, the data is checked and an error message appears if any validation errors are detected. The details of all errors are saved to a text file, which can be opened from the error message window. The most common errors involve missing information in one or more records in the data, or missing information in the STP setup.

You can run this validation at any time by selecting Single Touch Payroll > Validation Check from the Pay menu.

Once all errors have been corrected you can return to the Single Touch Payroll window and submit the data.

Checking Submission Status

The Single Touch Payroll Submissions window displays the status of all STP submissions. Once a submission has been sent to the ATO, its status changed to "Pending" - click the Refresh Status button on the Single Touch Payroll Submissions window to update the statuses of all pending submissions.

Re-submitting Data

You can re-submit data if a submission was rejected due to errors in the data. Once the errors have been corrected, click Resend to ATO to submit the corrections. This has different effects depending on the original submission's status:

If the status was "Not Accepted", this means that there were problems that affected the submission as a whole (usually problems with the company information included in the submission). Clicking Resend to ATO sends the entire submission again. The submission's status changes back to "Pending".
If the status was "Partly Accepted", this means that the submission as a whole was accepted, but one or more of the employee records included in the submission were rejected. Clicking Resend to ATO creates a new submission containing only those records that were rejected in the original submission. The original submission's status stays at "Partly Accepted", and a note is added to its Notes column identifying the new submission that corrects it. The new submission’s STP Type column displays “Update” and its Is Correction? column contains “Yes”.