Only a registered BAS agent or tax agent may lodge activity statements for a fee. We are registration 26298194, verifiable on the Tax Practitioners Board public register, and we lodge from files our own team has reconciled rather than from figures someone else assembled.
BAS sits inside a monthly finance function at $2,500 to $6,000, not as a cheap standalone lodgement. A statement prepared from an unreconciled file is how six-figure GST holes get created.
Plenty of unregistered bookkeepers lodge BAS for a fee. It exposes them to civil penalties and leaves you with a statement prepared by someone carrying no professional indemnity cover, no code of conduct obligation and no registration to lose. Ask any provider for their number and check it on the TPB register. Ours is 26298194.
Bank accounts reconciled, GST control account agreed, PAYG withholding matched to payroll. Only then is the statement prepared, reviewed by a CA-qualified senior and sent to you for approval. GST coding errors do not announce themselves, they repeat every cycle, and the reconciliation that would catch them is the step most cheap lodgement services skip.
Failure to lodge penalties accrue in 28-day blocks from the due date and apply even when the statement is a refund. Registered agents access lodgement concessions that businesses lodging directly cannot, which in practice buys weeks on most quarterly cycles. Your obligations sit on one calendar rather than in someone's memory.
Monthly or quarterly, prepared from a reconciled file and lodged under registration 26298194. You see the figures and approve before anything goes to the ATO.
The preparation work is where the value sits. GST reconciled back to the general ledger rather than taken from the Xero activity statement report, wages checked out of GST fields, capital purchases separated from expenses, and intercompany transfers checked so they are not picked up as sales.
Clients typically move from a quarterly scramble to a statement that is ready and agreed before the due date, every cycle.
Where your GST cycle is quarterly but PAYG withholding is monthly, the instalment activity statement covers the months between. We run both on one calendar so nothing falls between the two cycles.
PAYG instalments get reviewed rather than paid on autopilot. Where your circumstances have changed materially, a bad year following a good one, the instalment can be varied instead of overpaying and waiting for a refund at year end. Varying too far down attracts interest, so it is an estimate we document.
Clients typically stop paying instalments based on a year that no longer resembles the current one.
Coding errors compound silently. A supplier miscoded as taxable when the supply is GST-free repeats every quarter until someone looks, and the total is usually a multiple of what anyone expected.
When we find one, the first job is establishing how far back it runs, not fixing the most recent statement. Depending on size and type it is corrected in the next statement or by revising the original lodgement. We have taken on a client whose previous provider had left a six-figure BAS discrepancy accumulating across multiple periods.
Clients typically get a written position on historical exposure inside the first month, with a correction path and a cost.
We hold the agent relationship, so ATO correspondence, portal management and account reconciliation sit with us rather than in your inbox. Payments allocated against the wrong reference number are a common cause of a debt you thought you had paid appearing on a statement.
Where there is a debt, we negotiate the payment plan. A plan stops recovery action while you comply, but general interest charge keeps accruing and lodgement obligations continue, so it is not the pause most people assume.
Clients typically get their ATO integrated client account reconciled and explained, often for the first time.
Our experts will discuss your business, your finance pain points, and the services we can offer
We take your requirements and send a fixed proposal with pricing options within 24 hours. Free, no obligation
We will schedule a kick off meeting, give access to our online communication and project management tools
Deliverables start in week one and we take the function off your plate, so you get time back to run your business the way you want
30 minutes with our team.
We'll review your current finance setup, compare the full cost of an internal hire against our embedded team, and show you exactly what your finance function should cost at your stage of growth.
You'll leave with a clear view of what's working, what's missing, and where you'd save.
No lock-in contracts. 30-day money-back guarantee.
Prefer to book directly? Grab a time here.
You can lodge your own. If someone else does it for a fee, they must be a registered BAS agent or a registered tax agent. There is no exemption for bookkeepers, contract office managers or offshore providers.
The consequences run both ways. An unregistered provider faces civil penalties, and you are left with a statement prepared by someone with no professional indemnity cover and no code of conduct obligation. Search the Tax Practitioners Board public register by name, business name or registration number. It is free and takes under a minute. Ours is 26298194. Our guide to what a BAS agent is covers the boundary in detail.
Standalone quarterly lodgement is priced per statement across the market, often a few hundred dollars. We do not sell that, because a statement prepared from a file someone else has coded limits us to finding errors rather than preventing them.
BAS sits inside a monthly finance function, typically $2,500 to $6,000 per month depending on entity count, transaction volume and payroll. That covers the weekly reconciliation work that makes the statement a by-product rather than a project. If a cheap quarterly lodgement is what you want, a solo registered bookkeeper is a better fit and we will say so.
A BAS agent can advise on and lodge activity statements and deal with GST, PAYG and superannuation guarantee matters. A tax agent can additionally prepare income tax returns and advise on income tax. Both are registered with the Tax Practitioners Board and both appear on the public register.
Accountant is not a protected term on its own, so it tells you nothing about registration. Someone can hold a CA or CPA qualification and no registration, or a registration and no membership. Full comparison in our accountant versus bookkeeper versus BAS agent cost guide.
Failure to lodge penalties accrue in blocks of 28 days from the due date, up to a maximum number of blocks, and the amount per block is multiplied for medium and large entities. General interest charge applies to unpaid amounts and compounds daily.
The part that catches people is that penalties apply whether or not you owe anything, so a refund statement lodged late can still attract them. Lodging on time and arranging a payment plan is almost always cheaper than lodging late. Penalty unit amounts are indexed, so confirm current figures with the ATO. The mechanics are in our failure to lodge penalties guide.
Yes. Depending on the size and nature of the error it is corrected in a later statement or by revising the original lodgement, and the ATO sets thresholds for which approach is available.
The first step is establishing how far back the error runs, because a coding error almost always repeats across every period since it was introduced. Fixing the most recent quarter and leaving eleven behind it is not a fix. Where the exposure is material, voluntary correction generally puts you in a better position than having it found.
No. We are a registered BAS Agent, not a registered tax agent. Income tax returns, FBT returns and structuring are provided by an independent partner firm that contracts with you directly, so you know exactly who holds which registration.
We prepare the year-end file they work from and coordinate the engagement, which removes most of the back and forth and usually reduces the bill, because partner-rate catch-up bookkeeping disappears. If what you want is one provider holding both registrations, we are not it, and that is worth knowing before the first call rather than after.
A BAS reports GST alongside other obligations such as PAYG withholding and PAYG instalments. An IAS reports those other obligations without GST.
The common pattern is a business reporting GST quarterly and withholding PAYG monthly, which means one BAS and two IAS per quarter. People assume any statement with a payment attached is a BAS, which causes confusion when reconciling the ATO account. See IAS versus BAS.
Check the register first, because some bookkeepers work under a registered supervisor and are covered by that arrangement. If nobody in the chain is registered and they are charging you for BAS work, the arrangement needs to change.
That does not necessarily mean replacing them. Some clients keep their bookkeeper for processing and use us for the reconciliation, review and lodgement layer. It is worth checking prior periods too, since work done outside registration is often work nobody reviewed.
