From July 1 2014 all employers with more than 20 employees will be required by the ATO to comply with their new SuperStream system. The idea is to improve on the way Super is currently being reported and paid (currently very ad hoc by a lot of companies), and to capture all employees and their contributions. The focus being on simplifying the data and payment process ie One Logon, One form and one payment. If your payroll is less than 20, unfortunately you are not off the hook, as of 1 July 2015 you will also need to be paying your Superannuation electronically.

One of the solutions the ATO recommends for employers is to use a Superannuation Clearing House that lets you pay all your employer super contributions in one go, from one website – no matter who your employees’ super is with. Once received by the Superannuation Clearing House, your employer contributions are distributed according to the super fund details you provide upon registering your employees. A lot of Superannuation companies are offering a Free Clearing house service but, something to be aware of, is to question the length of time they might possibly be holding onto your funds prior to processing the data.

Businesses with 19 or fewer employees can use the free Small Business Superannuation Clearing House (clearing house) service administered by the ATO.

If you register to use this service

  • – your super guarantee contributions are counted as being paid on the date the clearing house accepts them

    – you have 21 days to pass on new employee information to the clearing house.

Most of the Superannuation companies are required to have a SPIN (Superannuation Product Identification Number) and a corresponding ABN – this website is a great resource to access the required information: http://www.spindirectory.com.au/spin

Time is involved however with the set-up and ensuring your payroll system is compliant and your accounting program is correctly capturing and recording your super.

Attaché has incorporated ClickSuper which replaces the manual processing of paying contributions with a secure e-commerce system. ClickSuper is literally one click in Attaché and then a logon on to the ClickSuper website to authorise and process – AND YOURE DONE…

Wage Easy have systems in place to cover most clearing houses so you can pay your superannuation electronically. If for any reason you have a Clearing house they have yet to come across they will quickly get their development team producing and organising an export format for you to use….

At the end of the day…..NO MORE INDIVIDUAL PAYMENTS, BPAY OR CHQ payments so any initial setup will be worth it in the long run. Time is now of the essence, so please contact us ASAP if your payroll needs some assistance to become SuperStream compliant.