Payroll end of financial year in 7 steps: it's that easy
- Jun 15, 2018
- 2 min read
We all know it’s coming into that time of year again where payroll needs to be finalised. Don’t freak out; simply check out the seven pointers below for an easy, breezy, beautiful payroll year end.
1. Finish any pay runs that need to be included in the 2017/18 financial year
The payment date is key here. If earnings should be included in this financial year, make sure they’re posted with a payment date of 30 June 2018 or earlier.
2. Reconcile your accounts
Take a look at this support article on what to look for when you’re reviewing and reconciling your payroll transactions. If you find any that have been reconciled to an incorrect account, you can either edit the transactions, remove and redo them, or use find and recode to allocate the transactions to the correct account.
3. Compare the payroll activity and payment summary reports
Compare the Payroll Activity Summary Report against the Payment Summary Details report for the current financial year and make sure that they match.
4. Found a mistake that needs fixing?
If you need to make any changes to an employee’s earnings, run an unscheduled pay run. Just be sure not to rename or edit the pay item name or the PAYG or SGC settings for existing pay items. Instead create new pay items via Payroll Settings. You can mark the incorrect pay items as inactive later. Take a look at the support article on how to adjust some common mistakes.
5. Publish payment summaries
Once you’re happy that everything’s been checked and is good to go, you can publish the payment summaries for your employees. As soon as they’re published, employees who’ve been invited into the My Payroll portal can view and download their payment summary. Or else email them to your employees as pdf documents.
6. Submit your annual report to the ATO
You can submit the report directly via the Payment Summaries screen using Xero’s dedicated AUSkey, or download an EMPDUPE to lodge it via the ATO portal.
7. Process any super payments
If you are wanting to claim a deduction on super accruals submitted via Auto Super in Xero for the 2017/2018 financial year, super batches need to be approved by the authoriser no later than 22 June 2018. This allows enough time for the payments to be debited and forwarded to the super funds for the 30 June deadline.
All done?
Crushed it! You won’t need to roll anything over or close off the payroll year so you can keep payrollin’ into financial year 2018–19.
The way the article broke the payroll end-of-financial-year process into seven clear steps made it feel much easier to follow, especially the emphasis on reviewing payroll records before finalizing everything, since small details can make a bigger difference than people expect. It also reminded me that administrative tasks often seem overwhelming until they're organized into a practical sequence, and that applies in plenty of other areas too. I even thought about how people approach research in a similar way, whether they're sorting through Nursing Dissertation Topics & Ideas or working through year-end payroll tasks, because having a clear structure tends to make complex work feel much more manageable. I’m curious whether the overall checklist has changed much since this was…