If you’re employed in Australia you may have noticed you don’t receive a payment summary at the end of the financial year any longer. Instead, you would have seen all your employment information through your MyGov portal. The Australian Tax Office (the ATO) has implemented a new online employment tax scheme called Single Touch Payroll (STP), a massive shift in how payroll and income tax is reported. This complex project was conducted by myself with two other designers, two project managers and three dev teams. Through agile design methodologies, we were tasked with designing and developing a completely new way for employers to simply report payroll information to the ATO.

Deep dive

The ATO announced to us they were introducing a new method of income and payroll tax compliance starting 1 July 2018 for any business with 20 or more employees. In this iterative process, MYOB had invested three crews to work on this project. Each crew had a designer and we worked as a cohesive design team to conduct user interviews and testing . There were also two product managers working on this business critical project making collaboration and cross-functional information sharing key to success. We found ourselves working closely with stakeholders and the ATO as we mapped out the touch points, tax compliance requirements, technical issues, and user journeys.

Findings & Opportunities

Over this 18 month project we conducted dozens of rounds of user interviews and product tests, creating user journeys, mockups and other design artefacts along the way. During this process we learned a number of key insights and opportunities we had to consider when designing the STP portal.

  1. We found that users were anxious about sending incorrect information to the ATO. We needed to make sure that our solution was clear, transparent, easy to navigate, and simple to understand. Most importantly, users needed the ability to correct any mistakes simply and keep a record of these transactions.

  2. We learned that Accountants and bookkeepers predominantly do payroll for small under 20 employee businesses. Most businesses with 20 or more employees would have a dedicated payroll officer. This had simplified our workflows and stakeholder management to a point. We concentrated on making that workflow for the payroll officer as simple as possible.

  3. The payroll process is a very high stress situation for most, if not all payroll officers, accountants or bookkeepers. It is a time sensitive process which requires a lot of focus and concentration. Mistakes can result in employees not getting paid or losing money to a wrong account.

  4. For our customers time is money, any additional process or workflow we add to a feature, especially a complex process like processing payroll, means they have to spend time learning it and understanding what it means for their business. Even though this was an ATO initiative, MYOB is the face to this service.

Technical Constraints

MYOB has been in business almost 30 years now and has a plethora of products on offer. For SME’s we have two main products: Essentials, a web-based application and the other, AccountRight Live (ARL), a Windows desktop application. Both products have a unique UX and workflows, and more importantly a unique codebase we have to use. In this ecosystem we must find clever ways to work with these constraints.

  1. The ATO announced STP would apply from July 1, 2018, for businesses with 20 or more employees, which effectively gave us a hard deadline of a little under a year to build the STP portals for both ARL and Essentials.

  2. Although the UX would be tailored to each product, it would be exceedingly difficult and complex to build bespoke STP portals. Luckily for us in preliminary product tests users had preferred a unified portal solution over other concepts we shared. This solution would allow us to build one service alleviating the need to double up work.

  3. The two products we offer have very different workflows, micro-experiences and UX. When designing the workflows for the STP portal we needed to conduct tests for all user types using both ARL and Essentials to be confident our solution was easy to use.

  4. Since ARL is an antiquated desktop based product it had a quarterly release cycle and at least six weeks of regression testing. This presented massive challenges and pressure to make sure the end points were in place and the experience was ready at code cutoff.

Solution

We built a solution that allowed our user to onboard to the STP portal without any data errors by designing a simple readiness check feature. This would validate all the required data in the users existing database and made sure it was in a valid format that the ATO could accept. Anything that was incorrect could be simply corrected from the readiness check feature. Onboarding was a simple workflow that verified the business and who would be lodging the payroll.  

At this point the business is registered and ready to lodge their payroll tax through STP and doesn't have to do anything until the next pay-run. This is where the real simplicity of our STP solution comes to life. When it comes time to submit their pay-run the workflow is exactly the same as it was before STP, the only difference is just after the review and submit screen we prompt the user to declare and lodge to the ATO which is accomplished by a single click. The user can then view all submissions, their statuses and fix any issues in the STP portal list page.

Outcomes

As the name suggests Single Touch Payroll is a light single click experience that allows users to stay tax compliant. Users were wary of any initiative from the ATO and we needed to make sure we could accommodate and alleviate their concerns. Despite the challenges we faced in this project we were able to give users peace of mind when dealing with the ATO, deliver on all of our business objectives, and release a service that was easy to use and was truly a single-touch experience.

“The roll out of STP from MYOB has been seamless with very little interruption to our clients as we already had them online and so we could just jump in and manage it for them with very little disruption to their business. Our clients are very happy with how it has all rolled out.”

Understanding the depth and breadth of payroll tax compliance were demanding, requiring many rounds of research and product testing. Single Touch Payroll has been a massive success for MYOB with 30% of all businesses in Australia reporting through our service and over 2 million successful transactions to date.