Jacob Fenech

So we talked about an employee.

If you're just an employee, you can use MyGov, you can use an accountant, definitely.

If you are a sole trader, it's basically like you are an employee.

You're including income in your individual tax return.

So you're not filing a separate tax return.

You're looking at, say, salary and wages and then adding any business income on top of that.

You've got potentially a couple of other things to think about.

So you might have business activity statements for GST, like we mentioned.

You might have POIG installments, which are quarterly.

So every three months that you're paying on investment income is another one.

But you're filing just the one individual return.

say you're a there's other things like partnerships or trusts as well they're generally ones where you're actually then you've got an additional filing so you might have financial statements that goes along with those but then a lot of the tax is still paid by the individual so you can get distributions say from a partnership the partnership's not physically paying the tax but the partners in effect are paying that still through their individual return but there's a couple of

kind of supplementary documents, I suppose, in the background that are helping work out where those distributions and things are coming from.

And then the final one, and probably what I would say is the most complex, is like a full-scale corporate structure.

So you've gone ahead and registered your business with ASIC.

You're keen on kind of... There's a whole different kind of world that you then...

um jumping into around like say limiting your liability um and reasons for doing so as well that you don't get that kind of protection as a sole trader as well so it's not just tax that you're thinking about when you're doing something like that but um then again it does make your i suppose your tax filings slightly more complicated and so coming up with the right structure um

with tax as one piece of that pie is really important because sometimes people jump into it.

They might have friends that have got a corporate structure set up and so they think, okay, one size fits all, which in the tax world, as in a lot of other different worlds, it really doesn't.

It could make complete sense for you just to file as a sole trader given that you're just doing a little bit of contracting work on the side.