Payroll dates are changing and not matching up with the ATO information

Joel_9211384

When I did my December BAS the monthly payroll I generated from Reckon did not match the ATO amount which is produced from the STP I upload.

I also noticed the dates are not 1 week apart, they are changing between 10 and 4 days. I am confused and dont have the time to deal with the ATO.

I have attached a screen shot and if you look at the dates since the 18/12 they are odd (not 1 week apart). I have not changed anything.

Any help would be great.

Acctd4

Hi @Joel_9211384

" ... did not match the ATO amount which is produced from the STP I upload ..."

Are you referring to the ATO online prefill amounts at W1 & W2 ? If so, this is very common - The prefill system is still in its infancy & is also not updated in real time so it is frequently inaccurate &/or incomplete, hence the message that displays:

Also, that STP Reporting link provided, is to the summary record in your ATO Online Services portal - again another useless reference, because - as mentioned above - it isn't in real time, but unfortunately is what drives these prefill numbers. I NEVER look at the STP Reporting summary data shown in ATO Online Services - The only part about it that's reliable is that it confirms the existence of an actual submission at all !

Your source of truth for accuracy is always your payroll records from your Reckon Accounts (RA) software (which should ALWAYS be checked against the uploaded Draft STP file, for each submission) You can view my instructions on how to create modified reports for checking this, here:

https://community.reckon.com/discussion/8033502/stp-reporting-errors#latest 😊

The dates you see in those Paycheques are the dates within your RA program. When you process a pay run, RA prefills (what it thinks is) the payment date, which tends to be a couple of days after the pay period end date entered. It's easy to forget to correct this each time, but you can just edit each of these pay dates - on the relevant Paycheque itself - then Save & Close.

The date on your STP submission (for upload into Reckon's GovConnect portal) prefills as the file name in real time ... so if you process & date pays today, but lodge the file tomorrow, it will automatically name it with tomorrow's date - Therefore, I always edit/make sure my file name is the PAYMENT date for simpler submission identification in the list on Reckon's GovConnect portal.

NOTE: Every time you upload an STP submission, it's not that pay run's amounts that are reported, but instead all YTD balances are updated. This is good because if you identify a historical error for a current employee & amend it, the next submission you do will automatically include that correction, as this will be incorporated in the updated YTD balances. The finalise process also updates like this so if you've had staff leave since making any corrections, when finalising, this will flow through too 😊

Hope that helps 😊