Xero, bookkeeping, and payroll.

Yes. Xero is our preferred platform and we are part of Xero's partner program, and we also bring close to 30 years of experience with MYOB. If you are on MYOB we are glad to keep supporting you there, or to move you across to Xero when the time is right.

We migrate you from spreadsheets or older packages with proper opening balances, set up the chart of accounts and bank feeds for how your business actually runs, and keep bookkeeping and reconciliations current so your records stay accurate and BAS-ready.

Pay runs, Single Touch Payroll, superannuation and leave, all handled correctly in Xero on time every cycle.

A super guarantee contribution is on time only if the employee's fund has received it, with the information needed to allocate it to their member account, within 7 business days of the day you paid them. That day is the QE day, and it is the day the employee is actually paid qualifying earnings, not the day the pay run was entered into the software and not the day other staff were paid. A business day excludes weekends and any day that is a public holiday for the whole of a state or territory, including a state you do not operate in. There are limited extensions, including the first contribution for a new employee or a new fund. The practical effect is that super has to be initiated with the pay run rather than after it, because if you use a commercial clearing house its processing time comes out of the same seven days.

You become liable for the super guarantee charge. It is made up of the unpaid super for each employee, interest on those amounts, an administrative uplift reflecting the cost of enforcement, and a choice loading if the fund choice rules were not followed. One part of the machinery has changed and it catches people out: for paydays from 1 July 2026 you no longer lodge a super guarantee statement. The ATO works the charge out itself, payday by payday, and issues a notice of assessment. So the right move on finding a missed or short payment is to pay the correct amount to the fund straight away, before an assessment is issued, because late contributions are applied against the shortfall when the charge is assessed. The ATO has said it will take a supportive approach through 2026-27 and concentrate compliance on employers who are not attempting the change or not paying at all, which is a reason to fix an error quickly rather than a reason to treat the deadline as soft.

STP reports still have to be lodged on or before each payday, and still carry salaries and wages, PAYG withholding and superannuation liability information. What is new from 1 July 2026 is that each employee's report must also include their qualifying earnings, reported as a year-to-date figure. Amounts paid to an employee that do not attract super guarantee, such as fringe benefits and reimbursements of expenses, must not be reported as qualifying earnings: doing so puts your STP data out of step with what the funds report and invites a query that need never have happened. Once an employee's earnings reach the maximum contribution base, which is $270,830 for the 2026-27 financial year, no further super guarantee is required for the rest of that year and the year-to-date qualifying earnings figure stays at that amount.

Often, yes. An independent contractor paid mainly for their labour is an employee for super guarantee purposes, and that holds even if they quote an ABN. The super guarantee is worked out on the labour component of their invoice. The deeming itself is not new, but the machinery around it is: those payments now sit on the same seven business day clock as your payroll, and every payment made from 1 July 2026 onwards has carried that deadline. Reporting them through STP is not mandatory, although if you choose to report them you take on the STP requirements for those workers. Whether a particular arrangement is caught turns on the terms of the contract, so it is worth putting to us rather than assuming either way.

To their stapled fund. You request the stapled fund details from the ATO through online services, and you can make that request once the person has accepted your offer of employment, though you still have to give them a standard choice form. If the ATO advises there is no stapled fund you can use your employer default fund, provided the employee started on or after 1 November 2021. Two cases need handling rather than a default. If the stapled account cannot accept the contribution, for example because it has been closed, you ask the ATO for an alternate. If the stapled fund is a self-managed fund, you need the electronic service address and the fund's bank account details from the employee before you can pay. Where an employee does nominate a fund, you have two months to start paying into it, and any contribution due before then goes to the stapled or default fund.