Ensuring the Lawfulness of Digital Signatures for Planning in Australia

How to eSign a document: digital signature lawfulness for Planning in Australia

in this presentation today we're going to look at the end of financial year using gov reports what we'll be looking today at is the ATO reconciliations and how we can use some of the functions in gov reports to complete those we're going to look then at STP finalization within gov reports and how we can be using that area we'll then move on to our client review where we're going to look at engagement letters And archiving and some general card BS as well as non- lodgment advice so without further Ado let's go into the gov reports program itself some of you may already be familiar with gov reports so when you first go in you're brought into the bird's eye view which gives you a big dashboard snapshot of things that are happening on the left hand side you can navigate through the different functionalities you have my practice my lodgments my clients we're going to take a look firstly at atto reconciliations specifically at the activity statement summary as well as the at integrated client account so within the my lodgments area you'll find the activity statement summary as well as the bass historic lodgment we're going to click on the activity statement summary and we're going to select a client so this comes in very useful when you are going through and you are doing a Reconciliation of your lodgments that you've done up to the third quarter and you're doing the final lodgment for the year and you want to make sure that everything's been picked up there's been no changes that haven't been picked up and missed and this way you can reconcile as to what has already been lodged as to opposed to what is the whole GST or Bass lodgment for the year and then you can be comfortable in that what you Lodge in this final quarter will be correct so you can see here that it breaks it down quite easily showing you the G1 2 3 all the different fields and how much has been done year to date so this is just an older sort of version so it doesn't it's a sample file so it doesn't necessarily have a whole lot of detail but you can see that you can also choose year upon year so you can take a look at the different years now we can work with that in conjunction with reconciling our ATO integrated client account at the end of the year picking up any interest charges making sure that it reconciles back to what we have in the books of the business so we do that by going into our client selecting our client and then from within our client under the ATO Serv Services dropdown menu we can choose ATO accounts by synchronizing the account it actually extracts the information from the atto portal and therefore you don't have to log log into the agent portal to actually download the integrated client account from there it's simply a matter of doing your normal reconciliation process let's move on and look at STP finalization we can use the STP finalization in gov reports a number of ways we can do it for a normal finalization and lodgment or we could do it for lodgment for those closely held employees that don't necessarily get recorded in a payroll system it might be a once a year entry that's being done to record their wages poy super Etc and we also can then send it off for digital signature so the way we're going to do this is from within this same client we're going to go up into the forms area and in here we can find the STP payroll events which we can select once we've selected this you'll see the ability to actually have pre-filled information in there and then you'll have the start date for the specific pay period that you are doing and it can say whether it's an update event or a pay event and whether or not we're migrating from other software and in here we can put in the amounts but we also want to make sure that we bring in the employee details and we can do that by actually manually entering the information or importing from a software that may not have the functionality to Lodge the STP or roll over from a previous lodgment and the information will flow through which you can then update you'll also see a declaration down here and you can send it off to validate and send it off for Signature to the client if we take a very quick look at the manual entry screen you'll see here you have the individuals names all the different categories and commencement dates and the final event indicator to indicate that it is a final event now something that it's important to remember is that if you are importing from software where they've had software in another version previously they have a BMS ID they've been using a different software it's really important that you use that same BMS ID otherwise it could result in duplications it's also important that you use the same payroll ID number now if you don't use the same payroll ID number you will need to finalize both payrolls not just the one payroll so it's important to remember that for our STP finalization so the next thing we're going to look at here is we've sent this off everything's happening now but once a year we need to go through and set up the digital authentication letters I repeat that not the digital authentication but our lodgment Authority documents that allows us to Lodge the STP on the client's behalf and we do that by a number of ways we can create a document in here that we can send out or we can use a template such as the one that the ICB has provided in the past and use our digital authentication area from the apps at the top right click on the digital authorization and bring in a document by clicking on new document to send it I'm going to upload my document from the desktop and there it is complete the details of what has to be done with a brief message follow the prompts to send it off mark it for signal signature so now that I've done that brief message I go to my next page and the document will upload all I now need to do is locate the area and Mark it for Signature and the date before sending it to the client by doing this I have all my authority letters within the one location in gov reports that I can locate at any given time moving on to the next area once we've done our STP lodgment I'm going to come out of here and we're going to look at our client review so at this we may have a look at some of the clients we have on file some may no longer be our clients and we want to make them inactive and so in here we can go into the client and within the client on the ham uh the hamburger sort of bar we can modify the client's status and change them to Archive which will remove those clients that are no longer ours we don't need to have them there displayed if they're not our clients anymore we can also in here remove clients from the ATO portal the other thing we can utilize in this area is once a year we might want to review the engagement letters and we do that in the my prac practice area on the left hand side in the navigation area in the templates and letters where we can actually use an existing template and view them and in here we can use ones we may have already set up or we can add a new template if I go to create a new one you'll see that I have the ability to set the information up and customize the letter A I may see fit to make sure that it complies it has all the information that needs to be in there for that engagement letter to protect both the interests of yourself and your client the final thing I want to talk about with the clients is the fact that we can also set up for each of our clients the ability to go through and set up outstanding reports so so that they automatically extract from the [Music] atto by ticking the ATO forms and updating it you'll find that on the left hand side under my lodgments you'll find an outstanding reports area which will automatically auto update every time a new form comes through for that client so you don't have to remember each client and their forms it's automated there for you the final thing thing we want to touch on is the non- lodgment advice going into our client we have the ability for bass agents to do a non- lodgment advice for T if there is no T to be lodged for that year and for tax agents they can do it for the various tax reporting so going into that client you'll find in here in the dropdown sorry in the ATO Services the nonl M advice in here it will allow you then to complete this non- lodgment advice for the particular form for that particular client that brings us to the end of our session today I hope they've been useful points for you for end of financial year with gov reports