Real questions Australian business owners type into a search box or a chatbot — answered straight, with the honest “it depends” and the point where a registered tax agent’s judgement still has to sign. No login, no fluff.
22 questions · current as at 1 September 2026
Most small businesses need all three functions, but rarely three people. A bookkeeper keeps the records right week to week; a registered tax agent is the only person who can lodge and sign your returns with the ATO; an accountant reads the numbers and helps you decide. In a small practice one CPA often carries the accountant and tax-agent roles, working alongside your bookkeeping.
Read the answerThere is no universal answer, and anyone who gives you one without seeing your numbers is guessing. A sole trader is cheaper to run and simpler to lodge; a company adds cost and compliance but can cap your tax rate and separate your personal risk. The crossover depends on your profit, how much you draw, and the risk you carry — not on a rule of thumb.
Read the answerIt is common, but it isn’t good. If the only contact you have is a return once a year, you’re getting compliance, not advice — the decisions that actually move your business all happen in the other eleven months, when no one is looking at your numbers with you. A once-a-year relationship can’t catch a cash-flow problem or a structure issue until it’s already cost you.
Read the answerUsually because “profit” and “taxable income” are not the same number, and because a tax bill can bundle in things that aren’t this year’s tax at all — like PAYG instalments toward next year, or the tax on money you drew from a company. Loan repayments, asset purchases and drawings also don’t reduce taxable income the way people expect.
Read the answerYou must register once your business turnover reaches the ATO’s registration turnover threshold, or as soon as you expect it to within the year — and immediately if you drive ride-share or taxi, regardless of turnover. Below the threshold it’s optional, and sometimes worth doing voluntarily. “Turnover” means gross business income, not profit, so check the current threshold against your rolling figures.
Read the answerThe general rule is simple and strict: you can claim expenses incurred in earning your assessable income, to the extent they’re business — not private. Records and apportionment are everything. The grey areas that cost people are home office, motor vehicle, and anything with a private slice, where the claim is only the business portion and only with evidence.
Read the answerProfit is an accounting story; cash is a bank fact, and they diverge for predictable reasons. Your cash is usually tied up in unpaid customer invoices, stock on the shelf, loan principal repayments, tax set aside, and money you’ve drawn out — none of which show up as an expense in your profit. A profit-and-loss can look healthy while the account runs dry.
Read the answerEnough that a BAS or tax notice is never a shock — which means treating the GST you collect and the tax on your profit as money that was never yours to spend. A simple, safe habit is to sweep a fixed percentage of every deposit into a separate account, then true it up against your actual position each quarter rather than guessing once a year.
Read the answerSometimes yes — even when someone invoices you as a contractor with an ABN. If the contract is wholly or principally for their labour, super guarantee can still apply, because the super rules use their own test, not just the label on the invoice. Misreading this is one of the most expensive back-payment traps a small business hits.
Read the answerYou start from sustainable earnings, not last year’s profit — normalised for owner’s wages, one-offs and anything that leaves with you — then apply a multiple that reflects the real risk and transferability of those earnings. Two businesses with the same profit can be worth very different amounts if one depends entirely on the owner and the other runs without them.
Read the answerFair rarely means equal. A split should reflect what each founder actually contributes over time — capital, ongoing work, IP, risk and the relationships that make it work — not just who had the idea. The bigger mistake than the percentage itself is fixing it in stone on day one with no vesting, so it can’t adjust if someone leaves early.
Read the answerYes — before, not after. The shareholders agreement is what turns “we trust each other” into rules everyone agreed to while they were still friendly: who decides what, how new money dilutes, what happens if someone wants out, and how a deadlock breaks. Taking investment without one hands those questions to whoever has the most leverage when they finally arise.
Read the answerAudit-ready means your financial records line up with your service records and your registration, every month — not a scramble before the auditor arrives. That means clean separation of NDIS income by support category, claims that reconcile to what was actually delivered, and payroll and super that stand up on their own. The work is in the routine, not the audit.
Read the answerBroadly: records that show the supports you claimed were actually delivered, that your workers are appropriately screened and paid, and that your business is financially able to keep operating. The exact set depends on your registration groups. The principle is consistent — you should be able to trace any dollar claimed back to a real, documented service.
Read the answerIf you hold other people’s money in a trust account — as a real estate agent, strata manager or similar licensee — you almost certainly have a statutory audit obligation under the legislation your licence sits under. The audit isn’t optional or a formality; it’s how the regulator confirms client money was kept separate, reconciled and untouched. The specifics turn on your licence and state.
Read the answerStatutory assurance is an audit or review you’re legally required to have — driven by a licence, size threshold or regulator, with a prescribed standard and outcome. Voluntary assurance is one you choose, usually to give a bank, investor, buyer or board confidence in your numbers. Same rigour available in both; the difference is who’s asking and whether you have a choice.
Read the answerUnder Australian accounting standards, an internally built brand generally can’t just be written onto your balance sheet — the rules deliberately restrict recognising internally generated brands and goodwill. Acquired intangibles are different, and are recognised at cost. So “putting my brand on the balance sheet” is often really a valuation for a deal, a raise or a licence, not a bookkeeping entry.
Read the answerPossibly — but writing software is not automatically R&D. The R&D Tax Incentive is for activities that resolve genuine technical uncertainty through a systematic, experimental process, not for routine development or configuring existing tools. If you can show a real unknown you had to experiment to solve, and you’ve documented it as you went, a claim may be available. Documentation is where most claims live or die.
Read the answerYou can own the system you build around a model — your data, your workflows, your prompts and the software that ties them together — even though you rarely own the underlying model itself. The distinction that matters is between renting a feature inside someone else’s product and owning an asset that keeps working, and keeps its value, if you change providers.
Read the answerStart from the obligations you already have — privacy, records, professional and sector rules — and make the AI tool sit inside them, not beside them. Compliant governance means knowing what data goes in, where it’s stored, who can see the output, and having a human accountable for decisions the tool influences. The technology is new; most of the obligations are not.
Read the answerAn AFSL’s statutory financial audit must be performed by an independent registered company auditor — not your own accountant, and not us. Independence rules deliberately separate the people who prepare and reconcile your accounts from the person who signs the audit. What a practice like ours does is get you audit-ready and coordinate the process; the audit opinion itself comes from an independent auditor.
Read the answerTreat client money as never yours: it goes into the right account, is reconciled promptly and frequently, and is never used to fund the business. The client money rules under the Corporations Act are strict and breaches are treated seriously, so the safeguard is a routine — correct banking, timely reconciliation, and clear records — that runs every cycle, not a clean-up before reporting.
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