Payroll End of Financial Year in 10 steps: Piece of … Cake

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It’s the end of financial year, which means it’s go time for finalising Payroll! This doesn’t have to be the nightmarish hellscape you might be expecting, so take a look below at our 10 pointers for an easy, breezy, beautiful Payroll year end.

1. Finish any pay runs that should be included in the 2016/17 financial year.

The Payment Date is key here. If earnings should be included in this financial year, make sure they’re posted with a payment date of 30 June 2017 or earlier.

2. Reconcile your accounts.

Take a look at this Help Centre page or this video to check what you should look for. If you find transactions that have been reconciled to an incorrect account, you can edit the transactions, remove and redo them or use Find and Recode to allocate the transactions to the correct account.

3. Understand ETP

Any ETP gross wages and ETP Tax will need to be processed outside of Payroll so they aren’t included in the payroll report. What could be included in an ETP? Check the ATO’s website here.

4. Make sure your opening balances match the ledger

If you’ve entered opening balances for FY 2016-17, make sure that these amounts match the conversion balance brought into the ledger. If they don’t match, confirm which is correct and adjust the other as needed.

5. Compare Payment Activity and Summary Reports

Compare the Payroll Activity Summary Report against the Payment Summary Details report for the current financial year and make sure that they match. If they don’t, there’s a list of things you can look for which are outlined in our EOFY blog here.

6. Know how to make changes to employee earnings

If you need to make any changes to an employee’s earnings, this can be done by running an unscheduled pay run to record the adjustments.

7. Create new pay items

Create new pay items to make adjustments rather than renaming or editing the tax or SGC settings for existing pay items.

8. Publish Payment Summaries

Once everything’s entered and checked (and double or triple checked!), you can publish the payment summaries for your employees. In the Payment Summaries screen, select all the employees that you’d like to publish and click ‘Preview’ to view a copy of each employee’s payment summary. When you’ve confirmed that these details are correct, select all the employees again and click ‘Publish’.

9. Submit your annual report to the ATO.

You can lodge the report directly from your organisation using Xero’s dedicated AUSkey. Or you can download an EMPDUPE to lodge via the ATO portal or ECI software.

10. Check Superannuation settings

To kick off FY 2017-18 on the front foot, check that you check that any employees linked to a self-managed super fund (SMSF) have correct banking details, ABN and electronic service alias addresses (ESA). You can view these settings from the Settings > Payroll Settings > Superannuation menu.

All done? Crushed it! You won’t need to roll anything over or close off the payroll year so you can keep payrollin’ into FY 17-18, nightmarish hellscape free! Chat to you next year, friends!

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