As the end of the financial year approaches, it’s time to start thinking about your annual accounts. When it’s time for us to start working on your annual accounts, we’ll need some information from you.
Because we know you have enough to think about already, we’ve created a checklist so you know what you need to pull together.
What do we need from you?
Good news, if your business is already linked to us through your online accounting platform (like Xero), we already have most of this data. However, we’ll still need the following information for each of your businesses:
- Your bank balance on 31 March 2025
- Your Resident Withholding Tax Certificate
- Payroll records, unless we run your payroll for you
- Vehicle logbooks and mileage records
- The balance of any business loans at 31 March 2025
- Stock value at 31 March 2025
- Details on any dividends
- Accounts receivable and payable at 31 March 2025
- Any bad debts you’ve written off
- Any other income you received during the year.
Do you work from home?
If you work from home, we’ll need some additional information so that you can claim:
- a portion of your mortgage interest payments
- rent
- rates
- utility bills
- insurance.
You’ll also need to provide information on how many square metres your home covers and what percentage of that space is used for work. If you’re a tradie who uses garage space, you can claim that too.
Time to reconcile your accounts
It’s also helpful if you can completely reconcile your accounts. If you’re stuck with a tricky refund, part payment, or other anomaly, just get in touch, and we will sort you out.
The right information helps us to help you
Having all the necessary information helps us look closely at your accounts and make sure you’re not paying too much tax. For instance, if we don’t know about your expenses, we won’t be able to offset them against your income, so you’ll pay more tax than required.
Some things that are often forgotten are:
- Entertainment expenses
- Dinner and lunch meetings with clients and customers are partially tax deductible. Keep your receipts and check in with us to see which meetings can be deducted
- Bear in mind that the treatment of meal expenses incurred by self-employed people differs from the meal allowances afforded to employees. We can clarify this for you
- Subscriptions and memberships
- If keeping up with your industry via specialist magazines or newspapers helps you in your work, you may be eligible for a tax deduction on subscriptions.
Note: You can send all of your records to us electronically, or if you would prefer, send us the paper versions.
It takes time to generate accurate accounts
One last note – although you may not read your accounts with a fine-toothed comb, we do! It takes considerable time, attention and energy to turn your massive pile of paperwork into accurate annual accounts.
We will identify if you paid the correct amount of provisional tax during the year. This is essential, especially if your business had a tough time during the year. Getting all your information together means we can apply for a refund if you’ve overpaid, and adjust your provisional tax depending on your expectations.
It’s also helpful to have your annual accounts completed so you can analyse how your business performed. You can compare it to previous years and think about what’s working, and what isn’t, so you can make better decisions for the year ahead.
We’re happy to provide you with an update on how we’re getting along, so feel free to ask at any time.
For questions, clarification or assistance, just drop us a note or give us a call, we’re here to help.
