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Can you afford not to update your Sybiz solution?

Can you afford not to update your Sybiz solution? For the 2016/2017 financial year, the Australian Tax Office mandated a number of changes – including changes to Working Holiday Makers (aka the ‘backpacker tax’) and Fringe Benefits reporting – which impacted the information required on employee payment summaries. Unlike previous instances, the ATO also stated only this latest version of payment summaries would be accepted.

In order to produce a compliant payment summary, Sybiz Visipay users were required to upgrade to the latest version of the software. You may have been contacted by Sybiz staff in the lead up to end of financial year about the importance of upgrading to version 16.10 for this reason.

While we were regularly communicating with the Australian Tax Office, it was not until early June that the ATO reversed their decision and announced they would accept multiple formats. Had they not, some Sybiz Visipay users who had not upgraded in time could have faced difficulties meeting their end of year obligations.

Even more concerning, in recent months major cyberattacks have affected systems around the world. In May, the 'WannaCry' ransomware attack affected over 230,000 computer systems in less than a day across 150 countries. Microsoft quickly released a patch to fight back against the vulnerability WannaCry exploited.

Shortly after, the 'Petya' malware, based on the same vulnerability as WannaCry, devastated computer systems. Like WannaCry, Petya ecrypted the victim's data, holding them to ransom while promising to decrypt the data once payment is made. However, Petya actually deletes the victim's data regardless of payment.

Because they are based on the same exploit, systems affected by Petya would have been safe if the patch for WannaCry had been applied.

Situations like this underscore the importance of being on the latest version of your Sybiz solution.

There are still a number of upcoming developments which will require users to be on the latest version of their solution. We recommend you read the following news items from Sybiz to see which are relevant to your circumstances and speak with your Sybiz Authorised Business Partner about upgrading.
 
Changes to Taxable Payments Annual Reports in 2017/2018

The introduction of Single Touch Payroll

End of support for Microsoft SQL 2008 and 2008R2

If you would like to stay up to date on these and other important updates affecting your business, you can subscribe to our customer newsletter.

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