About
Two people in Sydney: an accountant who prepares Australian returns, and an engineer. The product exists because one of us was doing the preparation by hand and the other could see how much of it was the same job every time.
We are a software company, not an accounting practice. BeforeMay prepares a working paper — the review and the signature stay with your own registered agent.
Co-founder · CPA, registered tax agent
Nina is a CPA and a registered tax agent, and prepares Australian returns for her own clients. Every convention in the working paper — how a schedule is laid out, what a reviewer expects to find where, which figure needs a source beside it — comes from that side of the desk rather than from a product spec. She is also the person the output has to satisfy before anybody else sees it.
Co-founder · Engineering
Hao builds the product — the document pipeline, the model work behind the drafting, and the checks a working paper has to clear before it is handed back. The rule he writes to is that nothing reaches a reviewer as a confident guess: a figure the evidence does not settle is marked outstanding in the cell rather than filled in.
Prep time, not review skill, is what caps how many returns a season can hold. A senior can review far more jobs than they can prepare, and every arrangement that closes that gap — another hire, a preparer overseas — closes it by buying more preparation. This closes it by handing the reviewer something already assembled.
That only works if the paper can be checked faster than it could be redone, which is the whole design. Every figure links back to the document and the page it came from. Anything the evidence does not settle is marked outstanding in the cell and waits for you, rather than being quietly guessed — a plausible number is the one failure a reviewer cannot see. The deliverable is a standard .xlsx with no macros and no proprietary format, so it opens in whatever your firm already uses.
Client documents are stored in Australia. What that does and does not cover — including where model processing happens, which is a different question — is set out in the Privacy Policy and on the FAQ, in more detail than a page like this should paraphrase.
Both of us read support@beforemay.com.au. If you are weighing this against your current arrangement, the most useful thing you can send is a job you already know the answer to.