Business Activity Statement (BAS)

Each BAS period (usually quarterly or monthly), we run quarterly PRE-BAS SYSTEM CHECKS on your Reckon Accounts or MYOB file. (We can do these checks for clients that wish us to lodge their BAS and also for clients that lodge the BAS themselves or get their Tax Agent to do it). During our checks we come across a number of problems and incorrect entries. A lot of these can be fixed easily and quickly and so the correcting of these entries is done as part of our
checks.

If you wish us to prepare and lodge your BAS AFTER we have run the system checks, we can do this also.

Note: Although we will provide the Systems Check Service without the BAS Preparation Service, we will not provide the BAS Preparation Service without the Systems Checks Service. This is because we cannot be responsible for lodging your BAS without firstly having run checks over your system.

Although we take all care, we do not guarantee that your file is absolutely error free once these checks are done. It would be impossible to guarantee that. We do however guarantee that your file will be in far better shape, and far more accurate than it would be without these checks done. It is very easy for a Reckon Accounts or MYOB file to get “out of control” and become pretty much useless. By running these detailed checks over the file each period before you do your BAS, you are not only getting a far more accurate BAS, but you will keep your file in good order and keep it reliable.

When coming accross a major, very time consuming error/s that you have made, we cannot fix these as part of these checks. With any such problems or errors, we will provide you with a summary report of the problem/s. We will let you know what the problem is, how important it is to fix it and what sort of impact it will have on your figures and your bottom line.  We will give you an idea of what is involved to fix the issue and an idea of how much it would cost for:

a)    K.I.S. Accounting to fix it for you              

b)    K.I.S. Accounting to train and/or guide you to fix it yourself.

The checks we do (and there are more than 30 of them) are run in your current working data file which means that your file stays healthy and accurate.

Most Tax Agents that “do your BAS”, simply do just that. They rely on your figures with some brief manual checks and any errors they pick up are amended in the figures they lodge on your BAS but NOT in your file. So even the errors they do pick up, though correct in your BAS, are still wrong in your file. This means they have to find them and fix them again when they prepare your end of year financials and Tax Return, and meanwhile the figures you are relying on to manage your business throughout the year are not correct. Most businesses have to wait until after their Tax Return is done, 1 year or more after the fact, to see their correct financial figures and even then it is unlikely they are overly accurate no matter how good the Tax Agent is.

We saved one of our clients over $30,000 after 2 hours of checking their file. Once we treated all the mis-allocated transactions correctly they ended up with an extra $8000 GST refund that quarter and an extra $24000 tax refund at the end of the financial year. This had never been picked up by their bookkeepers or their Tax Agents but our expert specialty knowledge of computerised accounting systems meant that it couldn’t slip past us.

Most of the issues we identify during the checks will have a number of affects if not rectified: 

• You will most likely either underpay, or even worse, overpay GST, which means you miss out on $$$, or may have problems if audited.
• These things can also have a positive or negative tax affect if they are still there at the end of the year. Again this can mean Audit problems or missing out on $$$.
• Your management reports will not be correct.
• Incorrect allocation of Assets and Loan transactions can have a major impact on how healthy your business looks. This can impact your borrowing power with the banks.

• We check that you have reconciled each of your Bank, Credit Cards and Clearing Accounts to the end of the BAS period. We check that there are no un-reconciled cheques or deposits in each of your Bank, Credit Card and Clearing Accounts, that should not be there (the only un-reconciled transactions you should usually have are the last few cheques you wrote at the end of the month). (Note that transactions that are not reconciled still impact your BAS and TAX Return).
• We make sure there is nothing sitting in “un-deposited Funds” or other Clearing
  Accounts that shouldn’t be there.
• We look to see if you have had difficulty allocating any more
  complicated expenses or  income and we can allocate these
  correctly for you. (We do this by getting you to allocate anything
  you are unsure of into an “Unknown Income” or
  “Unknown Expenses” account).
• We have a quick look over your Debtors, Creditors and Inventory balances and check they are not going askew.
• We check each of the Tax Codes you have selected and make sure you have used the right ones.
• We check that you have allocated the purchases of Assets correctly and used the right tax codes. We check you have not accidentally “expensed” assets.
• We check you have treated your personal expenses correctly
• We check that you have not accidentally post-dated transactions (this is easily done; it is not unusual to find a number of transactions dated a year or more into the future). This may mean you postpone GST credits and Tax Deductions to a future year.
• Once we have run the checks we lock the period (which is not irreversible), so that you cannot accidentally affect transactions that have already gone through your BAS.
• If you are doing the BAS yourself, or getting your Tax Agent to do it, we will give you a report showing a summary of the checks we have done, any issues we have found and reports to assist easy and quick preparation of the BAS.