Jacob Fenech

So if you are someone that hasn't registered your business, so you haven't, say, set up a corporate structure that I know you referred to Owen a little earlier, it is relatively the same.

So what you're doing is in the same individual tax return at your end, if you're a sole trader or a contractor, you're disclosing any income from salary and wages plus any income from those additional activities that you're doing on the side.

So you need to be tracking your income and expenses as well.

And a lot of the time you can't necessarily directly offset all of, say, losses from your business against your salary and weight as importantly as well.

So another really common question that we get.

But if you haven't physically set up a separate structure, then it is pretty similar in terms of how you go about filing your return.

Okay.

Yeah, hopefully that answers.

So I'd say that the number one thing is keep up to date with your business activity statements if you do need to lodge them for GST.

It's something that we see all the time is individuals get to the end of the next tax year and they've got all these outstanding business activity statements.

And because you are in your tax return only noting income after GST, but you haven't actually paid the GST throughout the year, it makes it far more confusing than it needs to be.

So

If you're paying the GST as you're kind of meant to, I suppose, as you go along during the year and you're up to date with your business activity statements, filing your year-end tax return is just so much easier.

So that's my big one.

I see it probably one every three people.

It hasn't lodged business activity statements during the year, but may have needed to.

It's a really big one.

And then the other one, it's not like something overly out there as an idea, but definitely have an efficient way of managing your taxes throughout the year.

So whether that's a Excel doc that you're putting your expenses in, whether it's just literally like one of those file icons that you've got on your desktop and every time you are issuing an invoice to someone or you are

paying an invoice yourself, you're just printing and saving it into that Dropbox.