How do I create and lodge an update event and when/why should I do this?

An update event is used to report changes to employee Year to Date (YTD) amounts that you previously reported to the ATO. We do not associate update events with any pay run and therefore you should only create one when you have not made an employee payment.

We strongly recommend creating and lodging an update event before creating your finalisation event. You can use this to check the data and perform any reconciliation that is required ahead of your finalisation event.

Other examples where you would create an update event include:

• When transferring YTD payroll data from one payroll platform to another, to align the latest employer BMS ID data with the last employee data reported to the ATO.
• Upon transitioning from STP Phase 1 to STP Phase 2, and before lodging, the first pay event.
• To help with EOFY processes, including finalisation and amendments to STP. After the 30th of June, you must submit any changes made to employee data for the prior financial year via an update event.

What data checks can I perform to get ready before EOFY and creating and lodging the finalisation event?

It is very important to check that you have recorded the correct information for your employees. In particular, you will need to check that you have recorded the correct name, TFN, email address, and home address for each employee. It will help with validation and we will alert employees when their Income Statement is available. The Employee Details report will be the quickest and easiest way to collate and check this data. You should include the following selections:

• Name.
• Email address.
• Postal address.
• Single-Touch Payroll.
• Tax File Number.

Our previous payroll provider has lodged a zero balance for STP and marked the items as tax-ready. Will Employment Hero override their data when I lodge the finalisation event?

As long as you set up the payroll using the same Australian Business Number (ABN), BMS ID, Branch Number, and employee's STP Payroll ID, and if your STP lodgements are going through successfully, then your finalisation event will also be successful in lodging your final figures.

You can check your STP lodgements via your ATO Portal. We also recommend that you ask 2-3 employees if they can spot-check their reported YTD earnings listed on their myGov account. Check if that data is in line with the total listed on their most recent payslip, and showing no duplications or multiple listings. If you find anything concerning, please raise a ticket with our support team as soon as possible.

There are a couple of ways Full Access Users can contact the support team:

• Sign in to the platform as a full-access user.
• Click on the Support icon in the bottom right corner of the screen.
• Follow the prompts to transfer to an agent or submit a query with the team.

You can find a full library of information in our Help Centre. If you or an employee is unable to access an account, this handy article explains how you can reset your password, 2FA or unlock an account via Employment Hero.

Can I get the bulk import template now without starting finalisation?

Yes, you can also bulk upload this data in advance by downloading the template from the Employee Reportable Fringe Benefits section found on the Data Extracts feature. Make sure you have selected the correct financial year, and that you click the Download button. To read more information on this feature, you can refer to the following article.

We are adding in our FBT data manually. When is the best time to input this data? During the finalisation process or as an update event?

You can easily enter your Reportable Fringe Benefits Amounts (RFBA) via the Finalisation Event Wizard. Refer to the Creating a Finalisation Event premise and scroll to Step 8 for the specific details.

You can also export a template that you can use to bulk upload your data. You can do this by downloading the template from the Employee Reportable Fringe Benefits section found within the Data Extracts feature. Make sure you have selected the correct financial year and that you click the Download button. To read more information on this feature, you can refer to the following article.

Do I need to lodge all pay events successfully with the ATO before starting the finalisation process?

Yes! Please make sure you submit the latest pay events for the financial year with the ATO before starting your end-of-year finalisation.

Do we need to lodge an STP event before lodging a finalisation event?

Yes. You cannot lodge a finalisation event without first lodging a pay event or update event during the financial year.

One of our monthly pay runs (pay event) has a status of failed, but we have successfully lodged all of our other pay runs with the ATO. Will the platform include the earnings from the failed pay event in the finalisation event?

Yes, they will. So long as you have finalised the pay run regardless of whether you lodged it successfully with the ATO, the platform will include the earnings as part of the employees' YTD figures reported in the finalisation event.

Can we process the first pay run in July for the new financial year without having finalised the previous EOFY?

Yes, you can continue processing pay runs as you normally would even before you process EOFY. The Finalisation Event will only capture pay runs with a paid date between the 1st July 2024 and the 30th June 2025. We will include a paid date on the 1st of July 2025 in the next financial year.

If a previously terminated employee has not been brought across to EH, as we have lodged them via STP as final in their termination pay, how do you report their RFBA for EOFY purposes?

It can be a complicated process and the answer will differ depending on a case-by-case basis. If you need to do this, please raise a request to support and note in the request:

• The Employee STP ID from the previous payroll platform.
• The BMS ID from your previous payroll platform.
• Your ABN.
• Your branch number.

How do I get help from support?

There are a couple of ways Full Access Users can contact support team:

• Sign in to the platform as a full-access user.
• Click on the Support icon in the bottom right corner of the screen.
• Follow the prompts to transfer to an agent or submit a query with the team.

You can find a full library of information in our Help Centre. If you or an employee is unable to access an account, this handy article explains how you can reset your password, 2FA or unlock an account via Employment Hero.

The ATO has reached out and indicated that we are not yet reporting for STP Phase 2. What should we do?

Please lodge an update event to resolve this issue. To read further information on how to lodge an update event, refer to the following article.

Are the Stage 3 tax cuts based on the pay period or the pay date? For example, we pay fortnightly, and the first pay run will be paid on the 3rd of July. Will the tax cut apply for the full pay period?

Yes, the new tax rates are applicable for all pay runs paid on or after the 1st of July 2025.

Where can I find more information about the Stage 3 tax cuts?

You can find more information about the Stage 3 tax cuts on the ATO website.

Do I need to review anything specific to pay categories and deduction categories?

Yes, as with the preparation for STP Phase Two reporting, you were required to review each pay category to make sure that the classifications were correct. Please review again to make sure they are reporting correctly. You can refer to the Single Touch Payroll (STP) Phase 2: Disaggregation of gross article for further information and for deduction categories you can read the Single Touch Payroll (STP) Phase 2: Child support garnishees/deductions article.

We set our allowances pay categories to default. How should we review these?

For allowance-based pay categories, refer to the following articles to make sure you have set the correct classification for STP Phase Two reporting:

• STP Disaggregation of Gross and STP Reporting.
• Explanation of the other allowance type category.
• Reference guide for STP Phase 2 pay category payment classifications.

If you have set a pay category's payment classification up incorrectly, you must first make the required corrections to the classification. You can do this by referring to STP Disaggregation of Gross & STP Reporting. You will then refer to the End of Year Reconciliation for STP article under the heading Incorrect Pay Category Payment Classification for the next steps:

• Please see the review pay categories section of the End of Financial Year Guide to see how you can check that you have set up the correct Payment Classification.
• There is also a great article on the ATO website about how you need to categorise these allowances if you are unsure what to assign.

What happens if I have not finalised a pay run? Will the platform include it?

If you have not finalised a pay run, the platform will not report it or the data to the ATO. If you lodge your finalisation event before finalising all pay runs for the 2024-2025 Financial Year, you will then need to lodge an amended finalisation event so that the platform sends the correct figures to the ATO. It includes normal pay runs and ad hoc pay runs. If it relates to an employee's pay or is an adjustment to an employee's pay, you must finalise it to be reported via STP.

I processed an ad hoc pay run and submitted it via STP. I tried to create an update event, and it came up as zero

When you have earnings under an ad hoc pay run, the platform will include them within the finalisation event for the employee’s default pay schedule.

Do we have to complete the fortnight pay run ending 30th of June if our pay day is 3rd of July?

If your paid date is the 3rd of July, this information will be reporting within the 25/26 FY, so these do not need to be processed before you finalise your 24/25 FY.

Will EH update automatically for the extra Pay Run in the year?

The additional tax will need to be configured as a Pay Run inclusion, however, ensure that you have spoken with your employees and are only adjusting the PAYG with their permission. You can find more information about this here.

Where can I review my FBT Settings?

You can review your Fringe Benefit Settings via the ATO Settings page found on the Payroll Settings menu. By default, we will set the Is this employer exempt from FBT under section 57A of the FBTAA 1986 toggle switch to the No option.

Please be aware that if you have multiple employing entities, you can review and configure this setting for each employing entity as well via the Employing Entities page found on the Payroll Settings menu.

What happens to my RFBT Data for 1/4/2025 - 30/6/2025?

You would enter this data into your finalisation event next year, as it relates to the next FBT Financial Year (2025).

You can set an employee as closely held via the Employee File module under the Employee menu within your Payroll classic platform. To read further information on how to do this, you can refer to the following FAQ article.

We transitioned to Employment Hero during this financial year and need to bring in employees who had earnings this financial year, but were terminated prior to our transition to Employment Hero.

You can refer to the Transition options available with STP reporting article under Scenario two for details on what you will need to do.

If your employees are showing as Not Tax-Ready at the ATO, there are a couple of points to check.

1. A finalisation event or amended finalisation event must be the last event of the financial year. It is this event that triggers the Tax Ready status. 

2. Timing of the finalisation event may be the issue. If a finalisation event has been created and then another type of event for that year is lodged before the finalisation event, then the finalisation event data must be recalculated before lodging. If this has not occurred, then an amended finalisation event can be created and lodged.

Put another way, the creation date and time of a finalisation event must be after the lodgement date and time of, say an update event. 

3. Once the lodgement is showing as successful, it can take up to 72 hours for the ATO to process and the employee’s file to show as Tax Ready.

There are pay events that are currently in a failed or submitted status. What should I do?

The best practise is that you lodge successfully all your existing pay events before lodging any additional events. If you have any historical pay events not lodged in chronological order (from oldest to newest), then you should not lodge these out of order.

The reason is that if there were successful pay or update events lodged, the historical events would contain outdated YTD figures. If you have not lodged these events in order, the best practise is to leave them and process them as an update event.

Can I produce a payment summary for my employees who still want a printed version?

No, if you are reporting for STP, your employees will need to access their Income Statement via their myGov account. Making sure their email address is correct is important, as they will receive an email when their Income Statement is available in their portal.

You may wish to communicate this in advance to your employees, especially if they may need to set up their myGov account access. If your employees need help to create a myGov account, you can send them this external link from Services Australia.

Where does it show the grossed-up RFBT?

The grossed-up RFBA is a figure you will need to calculate and enter on your Finalisation Event for any employees with reportable fringe benefits. For steps on how to enter this data, refer to Step 3 in the following article STP: Processing Finalisation Events Using The EOFY Wizard. To read further information on Gross-up rates for FBT, please see this link from the ATO.

How do we report on a permanent employee who was terminated and then reinstated in a casual position, then?

If you previously marked an employee as final because of a termination, but you have since reinstated them, then you will need to:

• Create and Lodge an Update Event.
• Then untick the Is Final tick box.
• If they do not appear in the Update Event, you can use the Add Employee feature to include them and then untick the Is Final tick box.
• Then once you lodge this event, they can continue to have their year-to-date figures reported to the ATO and they will appear in your Finalisation Event.

If you have already lodged your Finalisation Event and you excluded them from this lodgement, but you now have additional earnings to report for them then you will need to create and lodge an amended finalisation event.

How do we make sure we include any RESC payments, such as salary sacrifice super in the finalisation event for our employees?

Any RESC payment, such as salary sacrifice super, that you have processed in the pay run for this financial year will automatically show in your finalisation event. We will generate this data from any pre-tax deduction that you paid to a super fund. You can set up any RESC payment incurred for an employee for this financial year before migrating to the Payroll classic platform within the employee's Opening Balances screen.

If an existing Salary Sacrifice Super deduction category has been used to pay deductions manually or to a bank account in the past, will it update with the RESC deduction type?

Yes! Even if the existing Salary Sacrifice Super deduction category was previously used to pay super manually or via a bank account, the platform will update your deduction category with the RESC deduction type.

What reports should we use to reconcile data before we process a finalisation event?

You can download the STP excel report directly from the finalisation event or update event.

• Click on the Download button from within the event.
• Select the Excel YTD option.
• Open the Excel file.

When opened, it will have five tabs across the bottom and will contain your STP Year-to-Date data. It contains all your payroll earnings that you have reported for all employees attached to the selected pay schedule via STP for the financial year.

Itemised Gross:

It contains the earnings reported via STP for all employees for the financial year as above, but we have separated it out into individual payment classifications.

ETP:

It contains all ETP earnings reported for all employees attached to the selected pay schedule via STP for the financial year.

Payroll Year to Date:

It contains all payroll earnings processed in finalised pay runs for all employees whose primary pay schedule is the pay schedule selected when creating the finalisation event. To be clear, if you have created a finalisation event for the pay schedule Monthly, any employee whose default pay schedule is Monthly will appear in the worksheet.

All earnings processed in any finalised pay run for that employee will appear. Even if you have included the employee in an ad hoc pay run throughout the financial year. Who will not appear on this worksheet, though, is any employee marked as a closely held employee. It is because we exclude them from STP events and therefore you should not include them for reconciliation purposes.

Variance

It compares the total YTD taxable earnings between the STP Year To Date and the Payroll Year To Date worksheets, which is basically a comparison of what you have reported via STP and what you have processed in pay runs.

If your reported variance amount is $0, this confirms all figures match and you can comfortably proceed with lodging your finalisation event. If the variance amount is greater than a few dollars, to allow for rounding, you will need to investigate further and identify/resolve the discrepancy before proceeding with the finalisation event lodgement.

Not Reported referenced in the line minus Not Reported in the STP YTD calculations column on this tab refers to column V (Not Reported) on the STP Year To Date tab. The Not Reported figure/column is all earnings paid with the payment classification Exclude from Payment Summary (Income Statement).

Should we allow for some variance in our data?

You should allow a few dollars of variance to account for rounding. You can find more information in the End of Year Reconciliation - Single Touch Payroll article.

What should we do if we find a variance in our data?

If your report shows a variance higher than a few dollars, the first thing to do will be to compare each employee's earnings stated between the STP YTD report and Payroll YTD reports. It will help pinpoint the specific affected employees, so you can then investigate further the reason.

The general rule of thumb is if the variance is a negative amount, this means what you reported via STP, which includes the finalisation event, is less than then what you processed in your pay runs. If the variance is a positive amount, then the opposite applies; i.e., what you reported via STP, which includes the finalisation event, is higher than the taxable earnings processed in your pay runs. You can find more information on this in the End of Year Reconciliation - Single Touch Payroll article.

What may cause a negative variance?

The main reason for a negative variance could be that you included one or more employees in a failed or partially successful pay event and you did not report their YTD earnings. Afterwards, you may have included one or more of these employees in another event, which means you never reported them successfully via STP or you have not reported their current YTD earning. It would cause an STP YTD amount that is less than their Payroll YTD amount.

• Create and lodge an update event for the affected pay schedule before lodging the finalisation event.
• Once you confirm that you have lodged the update event successfully, return to the created finalisation event and refresh the displayed data.
• Download an updated version of the Excel (YTD) report and check that there is no longer a variance before proceeding with the finalisation event lodgement.

You can find more information in the End of Year Reconciliation - Single Touch Payroll article.

What may cause a positive variance?

Closely held employees

If you included an employee in any successful STP events throughout the financial year and you then marked them as closely held, i.e., they were no longer being reported via STP. If this is the case, you must unmark the employee as closely held so that you can include them in the finalisation event. However, you must not generate/lodge payment summaries for these employees, as it will overstate their YTD earnings for the financial year.

To report on an employee who you marked as closely held:

• Select the reporting option Report Employee Each Pay Run via the STP Income Types drop-down in the Employee File module Pay Run Defaults page.
• Refer to the created finalisation event and refresh the data by clicking the Actions button and then clicking the Refresh Data button.
• Download an updated version of the Excel (YTD) report and check that there is no longer a variance before proceeding with the finalisation event lodgement.

Incorrect pay category payment classification

There may be instances where you created Pay as You Go (PAYG) exempt pay categories to reimburse expenses or for any other reasons, and you paid these to an employee when processing their normal pay. If this payment does not form part of an employee's wages/salary, you will need to review the payment classification of that pay category and check if you have selected the Default option.

Our platform will report any earnings associated with pay categories classified as default via STP. Reimbursements typically are not payroll-related and you should classify them as Exclude from Payment Summary (Income statement), although it is up to your business to make such an assessment.

For allowance-based pay categories, you should also refer to this article to make sure you have configured them correctly. If you have set up a pay category's payment classification incorrectly, you must first make the required corrections to the classification. Then, what you do next depends on whether you included the affected employees in the finalisation event or not:

• Please note that you can not classify pre-tax deduction categories as default when reporting for STP Phase 2. Rather, you should assign the appropriate salary sacrifice deduction classifications. Please see this article for assistance.
• If you can see all affected employees listed in the finalisation event, then you just need to refresh the data. You can do this by clicking the Actions button and then clicking the Refresh Data button. Next, download an updated version of the Excel (YTD) report and check that there is no longer a variance before proceeding with the finalisation event lodgement.
• If you do not see all affected employees listed in the finalisation event, for example, they may not display as you may have previously finalised some of them in a prior event. In this case you should create and lodge an update event for the affected pay schedule before lodging the finalisation event.
• If the affected employees do not appear in the update event, you can manually add them in by using the Refresh Data feature.
• Then, once you confirm the successful lodgment of the update event, refer to the created finalisation event and refresh the data. You can do this by clicking the Actions button and then clicking the Refresh Data button.
• Finally, download an updated version of the Excel (YTD) report and check that there is no longer a variance before proceeding with the finalisation event lodgement.

You can find more information in the End of Year Reconciliation - Single Touch Payroll article.

Can you run reports in EH based on period end dates rather than paid dates?

The majority of the payroll reports are based on the paid date, however, it will depend on the report.

In the instance if the un-lodged pay event was from an old pay run, it is not recommended to re-lodge the affected pay event or any pay event out of chronological order. It is highly likely the pay event contains outdated YTD figures, and will affect the YTD figures submitted to the ATO.

If you are concerned about your YTD figures being incorrect, you can create and lodge an Update Event for the affected Pay Schedule. An Update Event will reflect YTD earning data based on the finalised pay runs for the selected pay schedule/financial year at the time when the event was created on the platform.

To Create an Update Event, on the Single Touch Payroll page click Create Update Event. Here, please ensure to click on the text of the button (as clicking the arrow icon will provide a different option). This will prompt the Create Update Event pop up where you can select the financial year and the primary pay schedule of the affected employees.

Previous Financial Years

If the event is from a previous financial year you will follow the above and also complete an Amended finalisation event for that year. Please follow the guide especially if there is any Reportable Fringe Benefits Tax to be acknowledged.