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 Link Technologies - LinkSOFT Documentation 
Help > Link Web Applications Portal > Human Resource Management > Payroll Processing >
ATO Single Touch
Overview

Single Touch Payroll (STP) is a requirement by Australian Tax Office (ATO). Electronic submission of year to date figures for employees is required from the 1st of July 2018. The electronic submission is required whenever an employee is paid. Refer to Figure 1 for LinkSoft Payroll Process Flow.

To meet these requirements, LinkSOFT produces a submission at the close of every pay. This includes backpay, special pay runs, etc.

Pre-requisites

The following pre-requisites are required:

  1. Register your interest to submit pay values to ATO with Link Technologies.
  2. Get an authorization token from Link Technologies (via ATO)
  3. Plan and implement ATO integration with Link Technologies
  4. Go-Live with ATO integration

Steps

Once the pre-requisites have been completed, you will be provided with a "Client ID" by Link Technologies.

Listed below are the business rules for STP:

  1. STP Schedule runs every "N" minutes where "N" is configurable on the WEB.CONFIG under configuration named: "SingleTouchPayrollIntegrationFrequency".
  2. STP is enabled in the WEB.CONFIG configuration named: "EnableSingleTouchPayrollIntegration"
  3. The STP process will run for the company configured in the WEB.CONFIG under configuration named: "DefaultCompany"
  4. When a "pay" is updated, an entry is created in the ATO "Single Touch" menu. The status is marked as "New"
  5. A user needs to edit this entry, accept the "terms and conditions" and save. This changes the status to "Approved to submit"
  6. The scheduler picks up entries that are "Approved to submit" and changes the status to "Preparing data to submit".
  7. All employees that are in the PayRun are picked up and "payment summary" values are extracted, packaged into the ATO "PAYEVNT" and "PAYEVNTEMP" XML format and submitted via SSP (OZEDI) for processing
  8. Once submitted, the system checks every two minutes for a response from ATO. 
  9. When a response is available, the response is loaded and analysed. If the transmission is successful, the entry is marked as Completed. No further action is required.
  10. If the response is unsuccessful, the entry is marked as "Failed". The user then needs to read the response and make the necessary corrections. Once corrections are done, the entry needs to be edited, "accept" the terms and conditions and Save. The submission process will start again.
  11. All steps are logged below each STP entry.

Notes

1. Below are the status received from ATO:

QUEUED – successfully uploaded to Ozedi
PUSHED – successfully submitted to the ATO
RESPONDED – a response has been retrieved from the ATO
NO RESPONSE AVAILABLE – the ATO has not generated a response for 72 hours

2. Below are the status implemented by LinkPAY:

COMPLETED - This status is used to denote that a submission has been successful. This implies ATO has accepted the submission.
DATA VALIDATION FAILED - This message indicates that the payroll data content is invalid. Invalid data can consist of country code, tax file number, state, etc. The error message displayed in the notes section (Figure 1 (3)) will explain the details of validation failure. The error message is a JSON format which can be reformatted using an online formatter available at this link. Please contact Link Technologies support if you need assistance with reading the error messages.
FAILED - Failure in submission where the user has no control. This could be caused by network access, firewalls or API availability. In this case, users are asked to contact Link Technologies support.

Figure 1: STP Processes.

Figure 2: ATO Single Touch Submission