Working papers, GST and the ATO
Practical notes for Australian tax agents — how a figure gets from a client's document to an ATO item, and what usually goes wrong on the way.
Working on a return right now? The free calculators run on the same rate book our working papers do — a page per financial year, no sign-up.
Your next hire is not another preparer
The season hurt, so you write an ad for another preparer. But the pile that grew wasn't unprepared files — it was files waiting on you.
What a seasonal hire interview should test
Everyone asks which software they've used. It's the one thing on the list you can teach in a week, and it hides the four things you can't.
The junior work is where seniors come from
Ticking and casting was never the valuable part. It was the apprenticeship, and it left the building with the manual work nobody meant to keep.
Why working papers come back from review
The partner isn't checking your arithmetic. They're checking whether they can get from a figure back to the document it came from without getting up and finding you.
Chasing documents is the real bottleneck
A return takes three hours of work and seven weeks of calendar. Nobody bills the seven weeks, nobody schedules them, and they decide how your season goes.