AccountRight Plus and Premier (v2018.2 and later), Australia only

When you finalise an employee, you're telling the ATO that your payroll reporting is complete for the financial year and that the employee can now complete their tax return.

If you need to make changes to an employee's pay after finalising, you need to indicate this to the ATO by undoing the finalisation. You'll then be able to make your changes and finalise again with the correct amounts.

You might do this when you need to:

• report on an employee who has left the business has returned within the same payroll year

• prevent an employee completing their tax return while you investigate an issue

• correct an overpayment or underpayment

• update payroll or ATO reporting categories.

The basic process you follow is:

1. Undo the finalisation

2. Make your changes

3. Redo the finalisation

How you change a pay depends if your changes affect the current or a previous financial year. If you're making changes in:

• the current financial year, you just need to adjust their next pay to account for the overpayment or underpayment. If your pay adjustment affects YTD amounts, the updated amounts will be sent with your next pay run. See Fixing a payroll overpayment or underpayment.
• a previous financial year, you need to restore a backup and make your changes. See Correcting overpayments and underpayments in a previous financial year.

Correcting overpayments and underpayments in a previous financial year

If you need to change a pay recorded in a previous financial year, you'll need to restore a backup and make your changes to the restored file. Note however that whatever changes you make to the restored file will not be reflected in your current file and you may need to make changes to your current file to correct your historical payroll data.