payroll stp and activity not matching
When the Accountant went to work on the BAS lodgement for the quarter the ATO prefill is missing a pay week. When I looked into it the stp for that day has zero amounts like an update, yet the payroll activity/history eg MYOBs figures have a normal pay week , payroll showing a normal pay week with usual amounts. I have already paid the super for the quarter.
How do I fix this?? I can not reverse a pay that is linked in a super payment. I can not do another pay for that week or other figures will be over in MYOB??
Only way I can think to fix it is to do a pay run for that week again, lodge it (STP) so it hits the ATO, then do a journal to reverse the extra amounts going into gross wages, tax etc so figures in reports etc match what they should be - is that too easy have I missed something - will the reports like super work or will they only show the new payroll not the journal??
Hi M0nty,
I get why seeing some of those STP lines showing $0 looks pretty worrying, but in this case, it’s usually not a sign that anything’s wrong.
STP isn’t the best place to judge what the ATO actually has. When a pay is reported as an update event (often when it’s processed after the original pay date or you choose “report as an update”), STP will show $0 for that period, but it still sends the year‑to‑date totals through to the ATO.
What really matters is that these three match for the payroll year:
- Payroll Activity
- Payroll Register
- STP YTD / YTD Verification report
If those reports all line up, the ATO already has the correct YTD figures. In that case, your accountant can just override the BAS prefill to match your MYOB reports, and if you like, you can also send a Send update event from STP reporting to refresh the YTD at the ATO.
If you do find that STP YTD is actually short, the fix is not to rerun the pay and then journal it back out (that will only mess up payroll/STP further). Instead, once any setup issues are fixed, just send a clean STP Update event so the ATO gets the correct YTD without touching the original pay (which is already tied to the super payment).
Regards,
Genreve
