If you are a company with business in Australia and are looking for a reporting solution to meet the requirements of Payment Times Reporting scheme (PTR), then SAP can help you quickly implement this mandate using Advanced Compliance Reporting (ACR). 

What is the Payment Times Reporting scheme? 

Purpose 

The Payment Times Reporting scheme (PTR) introduced by the Australian government aims to improve payment times for Australian small businesses. Small businesses depend on timely payments from their customers to continue making timely payments to their suppliers. Hence, long (more than 30 days) payment times and late payments adversely affect their cashflow, thereby inadvertently affecting the country’s economy.  

The scheme also hopes to bring in transparency around large businesses’ payment performance and create incentives for improved payment practices. 

Who Must Comply? 

Large businesses and certain government enterprises with total annual income of over 100 million AUD need to report their small business payment terms and times. 

Reporting Requirements 

The scheme is effective from 1st January 2021 and requires PTR submission twice a year. The first submission is due from 1st July. 

Report data includes: 

• Details on Standard Payment Periods (SPP) offered to small businesses, such as shortest and longest SPPs.  
• The proportion (as percentage), determined by total number and total value, of small business invoices paid by the entity during the reporting period in each of the payment time bands, prescribed as within 20 days after invoice issue date, 21-30 days after issue date, 31-60 days after issue date, and so on. 
• The proportion (by value) of procurements from Australian small business suppliers, compared to the total procurements for the reporting period. 
• Other information on payment practices that impact events and organizational data. 

For specifics on reporting requirements, please visit PTR reporting requirements page.

Look at SAP’s solutions for Payment Times Reporting Scheme

To meet the reporting requirements of Payment Times Reporting Scheme, you need a reporting solution that supports periodic reporting and monitoring of obligation, generates accurate data set as prescribed and quickly adopts any changes rolled out by government in future. 

SAP offers smart business solutions that provide these capabilities and more, to help your organization stay compliant with government mandates. 

Reporting solutions for SAP ERP systems 

Based on your SAP ERP landscape, you can deploy and consume SAP S/4HANA for advanced compliance reporting in the following ways:  

• For SAP S/4HANA systems, we offer SAP S/4HANA for advanced compliance reporting (ACR) that comes integrated with your SAP S/4HANA system.  

• For SAP ECC and non-SAP systems, we offer SAP Localization Hub, advanced compliance reporting service (SLH ACR). You can integrate your ERP system with the service to take advantage of its reporting capabilities. 

The figure below illustrates this clearly:

How SAP’s solutions help to meet PTRS reporting requirements? 

SAP solutions for Advanced Compliance Reporting are well-equipped to support generation of Australia PTR report.  

• Small Business Classification: You can seamlessly extract the supplier ABNs for small business classification using PTR SBI tool. The solution consumes this classification directly and intelligently prepares relevant small business payments data in a seamless manner. 
• PTR Data Summary: The solution generates PTR output as a data summary containing payments data as prescribed, entity data, and other data, enabling you to prepare and submit the report on the PTR portal. 
• Bi-annual Report Generation: Reporting tasks are auto-generated for 6-month reporting periods. You can set the due dates and notification preferences to efficiently track and complete reporting on time.  
• Data Analysis: Report data analytics enables you to analyze report data at transactional level and drill down to various dimensions of data. You can analyze report data by viewing it in a structured format or download it in spreadsheet format for analysis and audit purpose. 
• Correction and Ad hoc Reports: If you generate a report and submit it, but then notice an error in the report, you can generate correction reports to submit corrections for reporting periods. You can also generate ad hoc reports for audit purposes. 

Here’s how ACR helps in your compliance process:

Other Compliance Reporting Capabilities 

In addition to the features listed above, ACR and SLH ACR have extensive functionalities that can take care of your end-to-end reporting process, such as: 

• Legal compliance: Generate localized compliance reports for multiple countries to meet the reporting requirements laid down by governments. Whenever a government announces any change to its reporting requirements, the reports are updated well in time to enable you to stay legally compliant. 
• End-to-end Reporting: Generate, analyze, and submit reports to your tax authorities, all from a single app. Download the report output in legal format or submit it electronically to the government, wherever applicable. 
• Flexible, configurable reporting: Configure reporting frequency, reporting levels, due dates, and other parameters according to your company’s business process specific requirements.   
• Easy monitoring: Use the reporting dashboard to track deadlines and status of reporting tasks.  
• Reporting activities: Ensure that prerequisite and post-requisite business processes for reporting are completed in the correct sequence by viewing and implementing them from the reporting app. 
• In addition to these features, ACR also provides workflow capability to enable report review and approvals. 

With these features, you can achieve efficient, compliant reporting for Australia PTR and stay on top of your global legal reporting requirements without investing large amount of time and resources. 

To know more about ACR and SLH ACR, see this blog post or visit the SAP community page.  

For release timelines, please visit Announcement of Legal Change app on SAP one Support Portal and find more details on SAP support for Payment Times Reporting in the SAP note 3005901. 

(The blog post is a combined effort with significant inputs from Suparna Soman.)