HR & Payroll, News & Updates

Are you ready for EOFY?

End of each financial year can be a stressful time of year for anyone working in Payroll. As the conduit between Finance and HR, the pressure to support these two other business areas often peaks around this time of year.

Some factors adding to the pressure may include:

  • The timing of employee review processes aligns where HR may want access to data and planning of pay increases.
  • Finance looking to reconcile accounts and budget for the upcoming year.
  • FBT Returns requiring additional RFBT Data to be entered into payroll.
  • Fair Work handing down minimum wage decisions.
  • Employees chasing you, wanting to do their personal tax returns.

And it is not as if payroll people can simply stop doing their regular day-to-day tasks, or employees won’t get paid. So, here are our top tips for how to get ready for EOFY:

  1. Reconcile everything in April & May

If you do all of your payroll reconciliations based on April or May month ends, you should be able to find any issues from the first 10 months of the year. This means that when 30th June finally rolls around, you only have 1 or 2 months to reconcile instead of working through 12 months of reconciliations all at once.

  1. Document your EOFY timeline

Know when your deadlines are and the work that will be involved, so that you can do things early.

  1. Be Pro-active with your internal stakeholders

Let all your internal stakeholders know what will impact your end-of-year processes. This way they will know they need to engage with you earlier if they have other items that may impact you such as EOFY Bonus’s or possible employee terminations.

  1. Educate your employees

Every year employees are looking to lodge their income tax returns earlier and earlier. With this come queries around when their income statements will be tax ready. Communicate with your employees early and let them know when items should be finalised, to stop unnecessary queries that may add pressure.

Another strategy to make your end of year easier is to move your payroll processing software to the cloud. Let your payroll provider do the hard work of upgrading systems around end of year and remove the need to engage your own internal IT teams.