Tax-time checklist for Australian sole traders
The Australian financial year ends 30 June. By August, your accountant wants the year's expenses, receipts, and a coherent story to go with them. Here's the version of that handover that doesn't ruin your July.
Two weeks before EOFY: don't panic-buy
Every June, the same articles appear telling sole traders to bring forward expenses to claim them this year. Sometimes that makes sense. Often it doesn't, because you're spending real money to save tax money at a fraction of the rate, and the cash-flow hit lands in July when nothing has yet come back.
The honest version: if you were going to buy something in the next month or two anyway, fine, pull it forward. If you wouldn't have bought it without the tax angle, leave it.
Week one of July: reconcile the inbox
Run a search for "receipt" / "invoice" / "order" in any inbox you used during the year. Cross-check against what's already in rct-keep. The mismatch is usually small — a handful of receipts from a vendor whose email format the parser didn't recognise. Forward those across now, while you still remember what they were for.
Also: check for receipts from accounts you forgot to connect (an old Yahoo, a spouse's inbox you used once). The September version of you cannot reconstruct what was bought through which inbox.
Tag everything that's split-personal
The single biggest source of tax-time arguments with accountants is purchases that are partly business, partly personal — phone bills, internet, a laptop used for both jobs. Tag those with a "split" tag while you're going through the year. The percentage split (60% business, 40% personal, etc.) is a conversation with the accountant, not a self-assessment, but having them flagged makes that conversation 10 minutes long instead of an hour.
Reconcile motor vehicle separately
The ATO treats motor vehicle as its own beast. If you used the cents-per-km method, you need the logbook (or the reasonable estimate) and that's enough. If you used the actual-costs method, you need every fuel, servicing, registration, insurance, depreciation receipt for the year. Don't mix them together; pick one method and stick with it.
Tip: most people switch from cents-per-km to logbook in the year they cross 5,000 work kilometres, because the cents-per-km method caps there. If you're close, calculate both and keep the receipts for both, then decide.
Print, don't just export
The CSV export is what your accountant actually wants — they'll import it into their software. But also generate the PDF tax summary as a record of "this is what I gave them on this date". Filed alongside the receipts, it's the audit trail if anything goes sideways later.
The PDF lives forever; the CSV gets reformatted by accounting software the moment it's imported. Keep both.
The conversation with your accountant
You're not asking them to find your deductions — you're handing them a categorised, tagged, tax-year-summarised dataset and asking them to optimise it. That conversation takes a fraction of the time the "drag a shoebox in" conversation does, and the bill at the end is smaller.
Two questions worth asking every year: any new ATO rulings that affect what's deductible in your industry? Anything you flagged as "not sure" that should be re-examined? Both are 30-second answers from someone who's been thinking about tax law for a living.
Lodge by the deadline that applies to you
Self-lodgers: 31 October. Lodging through a registered tax agent: usually 15 May the following year (longer if you're a continuous client in good standing). Don't miss the self-lodge deadline; the ATO is sympathetic about most things and not at all sympathetic about that.
This works even better inside Receipt Keep — start a 14-day free trial.
When you're ready to do this in rct-keep, these are the click-by-click pages.
Stop rebuilding your receipts at tax time.
This works even better inside Receipt Keep. Capture, parse and categorise everything as it lands — and have one tidy summary waiting for the accountant.