Odoo's payroll localisation coverage for Australia is thin. hr_payroll ships the engine — contracts, salary structures, hr.payslip and rule-based computation — but the country pack that turns that engine into compliant Australian payroll is not something you install and switch on. In practice Australian employers either run payroll in a separate system and re-key journal entries into Odoo, or they hand-build salary rules nobody can audit. Neither survives an ATO query. Single Touch Payroll is not an end-of-year report you can catch up on: it is an event-based submission due on or before each pay event, with STP Phase 2 disaggregating gross into overtime, bonuses, allowances by type, directors' fees, paid leave and salary sacrifice. And the payday super reform moves superannuation from a quarterly task to a per-pay-cycle obligation with a tight window between paying wages and the contribution reaching the fund — a cadence that spreadsheet-driven SuperStream batching cannot meet.

We build a proper Australian localisation layer as a first-class Odoo module. Salary rule categories and hr.salary.rule records are defined per STP income type and disaggregation code, so the categorisation the ATO wants is a property of the rule rather than a mapping bolted on afterwards. A hr.payroll.au.award model, with a hr.payroll.au.award.classification child, holds the classification levels, base rates, casual loading and penalty/overtime multipliers you operate under; hr.contract is extended to point at a classification and pay items resolve their rates through it, so an award increase is one dated record rather than fifty edited rules. Superannuation is computed by a dedicated hr.payroll.au.super.rule — dated SG percentage, maximum contribution base ceiling, and OTE-eligible earnings determined from rule category flags rather than a hardcoded list — with salary sacrifice and employer-additional contributions tracked on separate rules so the reportable employer super contributions figure comes out right. Leave sits on extended hr.leave.type records carrying NES accrual method, pro-rata basis and cash-out eligibility, with accrual posted by a scheduled ir.cron that writes allocations and leaves a traceable audit line on every run.

On the reporting side, each pay run produces an immutable hr.payroll.au.stp.event record — pay event or update event — holding the full employee-level payload, a state machine (draft / sent / accepted / rejected), the ATO receipt id and the gateway response, so a rejected submission is investigable months later instead of lost in a log file. Submission is deliberately transport-agnostic: the module builds and validates the payload, and we wire it to your chosen SBR2/DSP gateway or to a file handoff, because your ATO software id and credentials belong in your ir.config_parameter, not in a connector we control. Super contributions batch into hr.payroll.au.super.batch, producing a SuperStream-compatible alternative file format contribution file for your clearing house, with a payday-super mode that switches batching from quarterly to per-pay-run, computes the due date from the payment date and raises an overdue state before the window closes. Employee payments export as ABA files with BSB and account validation, a self-balancing option and a per-run lodgement reference, built by a byte-exact fixed-width builder rather than a QWeb template so the file parses cleanly at the bank. Payslips, payment summaries and super remittance advice are QWeb PDF reports you can rebrand.

Access control is explicit rather than assumed. ir.model.access.csv grants plus record rules separate payroll officer, payroll manager and STP lodger, hide salary data from ordinary HR users, and scope every payroll record to its company for multi-entity databases. The same models are exposed over XML-RPC and JSON-RPC under identical permission checks, so an external rostering or timesheet system can push worked hours in and read computed payslip lines out without a security bypass. Automated actions cover the operational risks that actually bite: an STP event still unsent past the pay date, a super batch approaching its payday-super deadline, an ABA file generated but never marked as banked. We target Odoo 17.0, 18.0 and 19.0 on separate branches and build against your edition — Community and Enterprise differ around payroll accounting entry generation and document handling, so the __manifest__.py dependencies branch accordingly instead of quietly assuming Enterprise.

This is a build-to-order product, not an existing download. We scope your award coverage, pay cycles, super arrangements, entity structure and gateway choice on a short call, quote a fixed price against that scope, and build. Typical delivery is two to four weeks from confirmed scope. You get the full source installed and configured on your database, a parallel run against your real pay data on a staging copy before it touches production, training for your payroll officer, the git repository handed to your own organisation, and a post-go-live support window that includes supervision of your first live pay run and first STP lodgement. Legislative parameters — SG rate, maximum contribution base, tax scale coefficients, the payday super commencement date — are stored as dated configuration records, so a rate change is a data update you make yourself rather than a code release you wait for.