(Posted: December 2013)
The ATO voiced its concern about the poor record keeping practise of small businesses. Given the ATO conducts economy audits and targets specific industries, they have identified that the records of small businesses are often incomplete. Businesses are not able to substantiate the income or expenses due to poor records.
There are easy to maintain record keeping tools these days. With the era of cloud computing small business owner can prepare their “Book of Accounts” easily on the run. There is no need to keep the receipts in shoeboxes or create Excel files to record the daily revenue. Every transaction can easily be entered into a mobile phone, making perfect use of the technology. Real cloud accounting provider are Intuit, Saasu and Xero (in alphabetic order). They provide comprehensive solutions replacing the pencil and paper-cashbook or the Excel sheets. Starting from $15 per month and being scalable when you grow your business, the accounting record keeping tools give taxpayers peace of mind when the taxman knocks on the door.
It is a legal requirement to have your transaction records available for at least five years. Most of the cloud accounting providers cater for this and provide their customer with read-only access to their data, even if they decide to leave. Having good records will not only help entities in case of an ATO audit, it can also enable them to reduce cost when asking the accountants to prepare the business activity statement, tax returns or any other compliance documents.
We implement and customise the off-the-shelf accounting solution to your needs. Do you want to find out more about cloud based accounting software? Talk to us .