The end of the financial year has many moving parts, and this blog informs you of what to expect as the tax team works through a pile of work for you, our clients.
Should we start with the happy new year’s stuff?
It’s the end of the financial year, and no accountants were out partying all night with fireworks over our offices in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane and not over my house in the Whitsundays.
The end of the financial year means that there is a pile of tasks we need to get through, and we also need to prepare you as clients find a lot of requests “nutty and annoying.”
It’s not a case of packing up the accounts as we go past 30 June; we have much to do for Canberra.
STP finalisation: send payment summary to the client for confirmation and sign; if there is an issue, update and do it again.
This is single-touch payroll finalisation and the first thing to be finished.; The payroll total, the PYAG and superannuation need to be reviewed and added to what is declared as costs in the financials.
Our accounting team cross-checked accounts and documents and prepared a summary. Imagine the number of transactions that make up even a small payroll in a 52-week year with just a few employees.
If our accountants find a few dollars out, they must rectify it. The accountants’ skills are so essential here to have PAYG and superannuation correct to finalise. There is cross-checking, and sometimes we come back to you over minor details, so please understand that we are on a very tight schedule to finalise the payroll.
TPAR
TPAR stands for taxable payments annual report. But, this is an industry-specific report for companies that must report the total payments they’ve made to contractors for services.
TPAR report to the client for confirmation and sign. We can encounter missing information such as address, ABN, and contact detail, or sometimes, find out that ABN is deregistered.
Making sure you have the correct information from your subcontractors is essential. Without it, these payments are considered payments to yourself; therefore, you pay tax on the amount you have paid to a contractor you cannot identify with ABN.
The TPAR report we present to the ATO must correspond with the figure on the accounts. Again, in some cases, there are hundreds of transactions to be sure of, and some of our clients pay superannuation for their subcontractors.
The last quarter BAS and then the BAS summary
Think of GST as the tax that never sleeps. At midnight on 30 June, the close-off for the end of the year, the BAS must be spot on. Our accountants need to stop and recheck the BAS for the year. Some end-of-year transactions may affect the end balance of the BAS summary.
While we don’t have to involve our clients, we want you to know that our accountants must trawl back to ensure all the BAS is spot on. Occasionally there is a credit for you, and occasionally there may be a small payment, but as we work all year to get this right, there is often no effect.
Usually, the BAS is completed by a high-level review.
Annual Tax returns for company and personnel.
New Your Business Angels / Fresh Numbers Policy
Individual tax returns are due by 31 October. Company tax returns are generally due by 28 February each year. Our new policy is to complete tax returns as soon as possible, especially for company and business returns.
Why – because the economy will not get sweater anytime soon, and having a finalised set of accounts is a good starting point for planning your year in the future.
So soon, we will start asking for a whole lot of stuff, and some of it will seem ridiculous to you, but for many things, we need to have the source document to complete the accounts. Please “go along with it” TO HELP US.
Please complete the questionnaire and list for us, and send what we request when the questionnaire comes out. The number of things our tax team must tick in those ATO boxes is a nightmare, and your help is crucial.
I admit some of the things the tax team are asking for you may have already sent us, but if they have everything in one place, we can move faster. The information we have on you already is in secure online files were various members of the team have access, and the tax team in asking you for help or maybe a repeat of a document is saving hours to get to the place they need to be – your tax return and your business tax returns.
Those lists will be out very soon; perhaps no more than an hour is required to help us. As usual, we want your questions, and we want to clarify anything you don’t understand.
In American movies, a cop gets on a loudspeaker and says, “Thank you for your cooperation? Anyway “thank you for your help, questions and cooperation”.
