All Sorts of Entities ...

It's been a while since I've written a LinkedIn article - I've been busy as a member of the ATO Single Touch Payroll (STP) - Payroll Working Group, collaborating with government and industry to design the best parameters possible for the government requirements for STP Phase 2. That's a real game-changer! But my article's not about STP Phase 2 - that's a subject for many, many future articles!

This article is about appreciating the audience using STP right now. I guess it was prompted by the number of posts I've read recently from those supporting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) who honestly believe that their experience of STP is the same for all businesses. That couldn't be further from the truth.

Networking

There is no disputing that the number of SMEs far exceeds the number of large and big businesses with employer obligations in Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has fantastic statistics to illustrate the exponential differences in numbers, including stats using the STP data. However, I've observed that accountants and tax agents are the key representatives for SMEs when it comes to STP. Those stakeholders generally provide payroll services to SMEs and use the software designed for that market. They discuss their common issues and challenges on social media and appear, to my ignorant self, to have similar experiences within the range of their clients and software.

No so for large and big business. Some do outsource their payroll to Payroll Bureaus that may even be offshore. Most have their own dedicated internal payroll teams that are not accountants or tax agents in financial teams. These payroll teams don't tend to go on social media to talk about their experiences of STP or their STP-enabled software. Their challenges remain confidential: a matter for their business and their payroll software provider. But there are LOTS of payroll professionals in large and big business and they pay significantly large volumes of the employees in Australia. They reach out to their payroll associations for assistance: the TAPS hotline is the go-to support.

Is it Time to Share?

It's not a competition, as it takes all sorts to maintain a successful economy, and all sized businesses play a very important role in the employment of our citizens. But maybe SME stakeholders would benefit from some insights into payroll and STP for large and big businesses? When the ATO communicates about STP, it tends to do it for discrete groups of stakeholders. That's a good thing for those stakeholders: a tailored communication experience.

But wouldn't it be interesting for those supporting SMEs to hear about the STP experience for large and big business? Would it be interesting to hear about:

• Economic groups of multiple ABNs and branches on the same payroll? Staff movements across those ABNs on a regular basis?
• That the diversity of industrial instruments that apply to a workforce in the tens or hundreds of thousands means you may have many different payroll cycles with different frequencies and paydays and you have to run many out-of-cycle pays multiple times every day for a few hundred employees at a time? That you have dedicated teams for different payroll areas?
• That there are frequent acquisitions and divestments of ABNs that are part of the standard operations of payroll, migrating staff from newly acquired businesses onto your core payroll and migrating staff to different payroll solutions for divested businesses, forcing you to support multiple simultaneous payroll solutions at the same time.
• That there are such massive volumes of employment transactions occurring that the payroll team is separated into specialist units, some of whom have to further focus on support for employees whose surnames start with specific letters of the alphabet?
• That transactions are maintained by decentralised business hubs, or in each workplace directly? That requires ongoing training and education to alert them to their obligations?
• That the constant management of data integrity, monitoring and error-handling is so large that you have to run multiple preliminary pays just to identify the errors early enough to give you time to solve them before pay cut-off? That the running of all the critical programs is like a well-orchestrated ballet?
• That you have to constantly liaise with your Industrial Relations teams, Legal teams, Financial teams, Human Resources teams, Health and Safety teams, Information Technology teams, System Support teams and also stay current on your corporate responsibilities?
• That you have dedicated staff to address the government reporting, superannuation reporting, corporate reporting? You have other dedicated payroll accounting teams to address the financial matters of payroll: the reconciliations, vendor payment runs, remittance advices to payroll 3rd party providers?
• That your payroll team gets to experience an incredible array of diverse transactions in such significant volumes that you become expert-level at the complex and unusual?
• That you juggle significant different industrial conditions through modern awards, enterprise agreements, individual agreements, generous employer schemes to support the staff to do the best job they can for the business?
• That their software has to onboard all workers to even permit site or network access, not just for payroll? That people and payroll systems feed data to multiple downstream corporate systems to ensure that the business software experience is secure, seamless and has real-time data available at the fingertips of those who need to know?
• That you have global mobility teams to manage workers relocating inbound and outbound for both permanent and temporary work with your overseas entities?
• That you have to juggle all state/territories obligations for payroll tax, workcover and long service leave for a fluid workforce?
• That these customers demand all the bells and whistles from their payroll software provider, that the functionality is as seamless and automated as possible, but catering for each of their very disparate business structures, operations and industry?
• That they must constantly dedicate time and resources to review and test software changes and ensure that all industrial and Fair Work requirement changes are reflected in their solutions at their discretion?

How do you think their STP experience compares to yours? You'll probably never know.

Now imagine coming up with a common set of rules for STP that will support this diverse array of business operations? There is no "one size fits all" for payroll!