Employee number Single touch payroll not ATO requirement

Cathy_7327712
Cathy_7327712 Member Posts: 31
edited February 2019 in Accounts Hosted
Single touch payroll in Reckon online requires an employee number. This is not an ATO requirement. Can I just use 0 for all employees?

Comments

  • Simon Hutchinson_8164484
    Simon Hutchinson_8164484 Alumni Posts: 135
    edited February 2019

    Hi Cathy

    I can assure you that despite what you may have heard this is a ATO requirement. We would not have built our system in such a way that it was mandatory if it was not (prior to the STP releases, this field was not required by Reckon Payroll systems for ATO reporting).

    Can you please let me know where you heard it was not a ATO requirement to have this?


    If you put 0 for every employee, the transmission will be rejected by the ATO as they need to be unique.

    Thanks

    Simon
  • Cathy_7327712
    Cathy_7327712 Member Posts: 31
    edited February 2019
    Hi Simon
    Thanks for your response.
    I called the ATO when I was unable to get an answer from Preeti (Reckon Tech Services). The ATO representative (did not get name) told me without any hesitation that an employee number was not a requirement for STP  by ATO and that it must have been a Reckon form requirement. Regardless, if 0 won't work I will just assign numbers. I didn't want to do this if it was  not necessary. 
    kind regards
    Cathy Booth
  • Cathy_7327712
    Cathy_7327712 Member Posts: 31
    edited February 2019
    Can an employee number be initials? or just numeric?
  • gazza73
    gazza73 Accredited Partner Posts: 802 Accredited Partner Accredited Partner
    edited February 2019
    refer:   https://www.ato.gov.au/misc/downloads/pdf/qc54550.pdf?=primary_button    which illustrate a number of the reasons why a payee payroll ID is needed for each employee.

    Hope this helps illustrate the ATO requirements.


    Looking at all manner of other products on the market, they too have needed to add an employee ID  (payee payroll ID)  for each employee being processed, along with their YTD figures at handover etc....
    many example can be seen from the articles discovered with this search on the topic:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=payee+ID+needed+for+stp&oq=payee+ID+needed+for+stp&aqs=chrom...




    Gary

  • Simon Hutchinson_8164484
    Simon Hutchinson_8164484 Alumni Posts: 135
    edited February 2019

    Thanks for all that Gary :) And thank you for the response Cathy. The employee number can be alphanumeric. So both numbers and letters.