Top tips for businesses this tax season – 2017

Have you completed the following ahead of the tax time 2017?

• For businesses its important you pay your super well in advance of June 30. If you pay it after then, or pay it close to the date and it doesn’t hit the fund before 30 June, your super will not be deductible until next year.
• All businesses carrying stock should be completing a proper stock take. This is an opportunity because it brings it front-of-mind that you should be considering write-off of obsolete, damaged or devalued stock.
• Bad debts should be reviewed and written off where appropriate.  Why pay tax on accrued debts that will not ever be recovered?
• Bring forward any deductible expenditures as far as possible to secure deductions this year instead of in 17/18

For small business

Entities and sole trader type businesses – can you utilise the prepayment rules in your favour?

For business owners

Are you able to max out super contribution caps, or are you close to your contribution caps and in need of a check before 30 June to make sure you don’t get into difficulties?

Family trusts

Very important for all family trust entities, you must do trust distribution minutes before June 30. Oak Accountants clients will be corresponded with on this in early June.

Asset write off

If you are a small business and intend to use the $20,000 immediate asset write off,  the measure was introduced in the 2015 budget to allow eligible entities to write off asset purchases instead of depreciating them conventionally.

This is scheduled to expire June 30, 2017 so if you intend to make asset purchases that would be subject to the rules you would do well to spend the money before June 30.

Cloud accounting

As many of our clients would be aware Oak Accountants is a big proponent of cloud based accounting solutions and in particular we frequently recommend Xero as one such solution to our small business clients. Oak has recently become a Silver level Xero partner and will be migrating more of our internal accounting software across over the next few months. Talk to us about Xero options today.

 

Written by Steve Harris, Managing Director, Oak Accountants.

 

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