August 2017 Employer Interim Reconciliation Filing Season

The August 2017 Employer Interim Reconciliation filing season is now open and you have until 31 October 2017 to submit your Employer Reconciliation Declarations (EMP501s) for the period from 1 March 2017 to 31 August 2017, in respect of the Monthly Employer Declarations (EMP201s) submitted, payments made, Employee Income Tax Certificates [IRP5s / IT3(a)s] and ETI, if applicable.

You can refer to the SARS website for news about this.

Remember that we have a help page about the bi-annual filing process, as well as a guide – to take you through it step by step.

Please pay particular attention to the checklist in the guide, which will help you eliminate unnecessary validation errors when trying to upload files to e@syFile.

An updated version of e@syFile is already available, and it is very important that you use the latest version: 6.8.1. Please remember to make a backup of your current information on your computer before installing a new version of e@syFile.

We are happy to inform you that we have already made all the necessary updates to the system that were required because of the changes SARS made for this filing season. You will now, once again, be able to generate an export file of your tax certificates on the Submissions tab and upload this file onto e@syFile.

One notable change introduced by SARS is the increased reporting requirements for ETI, which include new and amended ETI source codes. Another consequence of the requirement for increased reporting on ETI is a slight change in the way tax take-on balances are captured – and some action might be required on your side.

When you do the pre-validation on our system (as described in the guide linked to above), you might get some IRP5 code errors – especially if you started using SimplePay after 1 March 2017 and if you already had employees who had qualified for ETI when you entered take-on balances.

Many of these IRP5 code errors should be resolved when you enter the additional ETI take-on information that SARS now requires. This should be done individually for all employees mentioned in the IRP5 code errors as follows:

1. Go to the employee’s profile.
2. Click on Take-On Balances under Actions on the right.
3. Click on Edit Balances.
4. Enter the monthly ETI Wage and ETI Hours information for the same months for which you had previously entered ETI Claimed and Remuneration information. <li class="example"> More information about ETI Wage is available here. Please note the distinction between remuneration and wage. </li> <li class="example"> More information about ETI Hours is available here. </li>
5. Re-do the pre-validation and check that the IRP5 code errors related to ETI take-on information have been resolved.

As always, please feel free to contact us at support@simplepay.co.za if you have any questions or need assistance in resolving the IRP5 code errors.

The SimplePay Team