Testing new Payroll entitlements in Off-line file copy

Question

Hi, we are setting up some new payroll categories and leave entitlements for public holiday/ celebration day swaps.  I would like to test these in local/ off-line copy of our current on-line company file.  To test the accruals are working properly i will need to run a payroll.  As we have a link with with ATO for STP2 reporting (for our on-line file), will this blow anything up if i run a dummy payroll from the off-line copy ?

Further to this, i found a post from 2019 about people wanting to do that same thing ie. run a 'test' payrun in a restored backup file saved in My Library on my computer, and not wanting the data to report to ATO.  They backed out of the signing/ delcaration, but still found the 'test' payrun was sitting in the payrolll reporting centre.

As this was now 3 years ago - will this still be the case ?  or will i be able to process a 'test' payroll on my local copy without it affecting any ATO reporting ?  Thanks

Sam_R · Accepted Answer

Hi @BB937,

Thank you for reaching out.

To ensure the test pay runs are not reported to STP in your test file, you can click 'Cancel' on the ATO Authorisation window that appears, and then select 'Continue without declaring', however, those pay runs will still show in the Payroll Reporting Centre as 'Not sent'.

if you were not comfortable with those test pay runs showing as 'Not sent' in STP for the current payroll year, you could run the test pay runs in the previous payroll year that has already been finalised with the ATO, and will also not show in the current years STP reports.

If you had  any further queries on this, do feel free to reach out.

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