Most owners looking for small business accountants are not deciding whether to have one. They are deciding what to buy: someone who lodges accurately once a year, or someone in the numbers often enough to change a decision while it can still be changed. Plenty of firms sell the first while describing the second.
Crest Accountants has advised business owners from Burleigh Heads since 1973. We act for sole traders, companies and trusts on the Gold Coast, in Brisbane and across the Tweed and Northern Rivers, and for clients throughout Queensland and Australia, across the industries we work in, from construction and trade to ecommerce, hospitality, medical and allied health, child care and manufacturing.
What's included
The engagement covers the work a business carries year round, not only the return at the end of it:
Day-to-day capture and reconciliation, kept current rather than rebuilt at year end. It can sit with us entirely or stay in your hands with us above it.
Activity statements each quarter or month, with GST, PAYG withholding and PAYG instalments in order.
Prepared and lodged for the entity and, where it applies, for the owners and the group.
Super, contractor reporting, fringe benefits tax and the deadlines that sit between the quarters.
Sole trader, company, trust or a combination, set up or reviewed before a transaction rather than after it.
Management reporting at the depth your business actually needs, with cash flow forecasting where the numbers need to look forward rather than back.
Someone in the numbers monthly once the business is large enough to warrant it.
Underneath that sits the part owners notice most: bookkeeping current enough that year end is a summary rather than a reconstruction, and someone who has seen the numbers before the decision that depends on them.
Who this is for
We act for sole traders, partnerships, companies and trusts, from single-operator businesses through to groups running several entities, and for everything from a first-year start-up to established operations that have been trading for decades.
Stage matters more than size. The businesses that get the most out of this are:
- Starting out and wanting the structure, registrations and systems right from day one, which is what our start-up services exist for.
- Registering for GST, or taking on their first employee or contractor.
- Spending more time on their own books than the time is worth.
- Growing fast enough that cash flow needs watching rather than checking.
- Facing a decision with tax attached: an asset purchase, a change of structure, a property, a sale.
How it works
Crest follows the same three steps with every business:
We get to know you, your business and your goals.
We review your current financials and set up or streamline your accounting software and processes.
We manage your BAS, tax returns and ATO reporting throughout the year, keeping you across your finances with regular reports and proactive advice.
To get started we need your most recent financial statements and tax returns, access to your accounting file, and the details of your entity, employees and contractors. Documents come in through our secure upload page, so the handover does not depend on a meeting. Moving from another accountant, we request your records from them, and you nominate us as your agent in your ATO online account. That step is yours rather than theirs, it takes a few minutes, and we walk you through it.
Step two is where most of the value is recovered. We work in Xero and MYOB, and cloud accounting only saves you time if the bank feeds, chart of accounts and tax codes were configured for your business rather than accepted as defaults. Reporting runs in the cloud after that, which is why a client in Cairns or Perth gets the same service as one ten minutes up the road.
Our office at 5-7 Prosper Crescent, Burleigh Heads is open Monday to Thursday 8:00am to 5:00pm and Friday mornings until 12:30pm, for clients who would rather do this across a table.
What it costs
There is no single price for small business accounting, and a firm that quotes one before seeing your file is guessing. What moves the number is your structure and how many entities are in the group, whether you employ people, how clean the bookkeeping is when it reaches us, and whether you want compliance only or advice through the year. A sole trader return is a different job from a company and trust group with staff and a rental property.
Compliance work is quoted per job. Advisory work is scoped and quoted the same way, against what you actually want done. Either way the fee is confirmed at the consultation, before anything starts. You agree it rather than discover it.
What your business owes the ATO across a year
Most obligations switch on at a threshold rather than a date. You must register for GST within 21 days of your GST turnover reaching $75,000, and that test looks forward as well as back, so a new business expecting to pass the threshold in its first year registers from the start rather than waiting for the invoices to add up. Register late and the ATO can require GST on sales made from the date you should have registered, with penalties and interest on top.
Reporting quarterly, which you can do while GST turnover is under $20 million, your business activity statements are due 28 October, 28 February, 28 April and 28 July. Lodging online generally buys an extra two weeks on every quarter except October to December, which already carries an extension, and a registered agent can buy more. You can report monthly even when you are not required to, and businesses with lumpy income often should, because three smaller payments are easier to fund than one large one.
Employ people and Single Touch Payroll reports go to the ATO on every pay run, with a finalisation declaration due by 14 July. It has to cover everyone you paid during the year, including casuals and staff who left in September, which is the step most often missed. Pay contractors for building and construction, cleaning, courier or road freight, IT, or security work, and a taxable payments annual report is due by 28 August, on a proportional test: you lodge if 10% or more of your business income came from a reportable service. Provide cars, entertainment, car parking or other benefits to your staff and you may be liable for fringe benefits tax. The FBT year ends 31 March, three months before the income tax year, and where a return is required the return and the payment are both due 21 May.
If you employ people, super is no longer a quarterly job
For employee earnings paid from 1 July 2026, the ATO’s Payday Super rules replace the quarterly cycle. Your contribution is only on time if the fund has received it, with the information needed to allocate it, within 7 business days of paying the employee. Twenty business days are allowed for a first contribution for a new employee or a new fund. The amount has not changed, at 12% of qualifying earnings through SuperStream, but super is now a payroll cost funded on payday rather than a liability settled later.
Two details inside the rule catch people out. A business day excludes any day that is a public holiday for the whole of an Australian state or territory, not only your own, so a public holiday in Darwin extends a Queensland employer’s deadline. And if you pay through a commercial clearing house, the seven days run to the date the fund receives the money, not the date you pressed send, so the processing lag sits inside your deadline rather than outside it.
Miss it and the super guarantee charge applies, assessed by the ATO for each payday rather than reported by you, and made up of the unpaid super, notional earnings, an administrative uplift, and a choice loading where the fund choice rules were not followed. That charge is now deductible across all four components for paydays from 1 July 2026, which it was not under the quarterly system. Interest and the late payment penalty remain non-deductible.
One step sits before all of this. Where a new employee does not nominate a fund, you cannot simply use your default: you have to request their stapled super fund from the ATO, which you can do once they have started and you have submitted their tax file number declaration. The default is only available where the ATO says there is no stapled fund.
The workers you did not think were employees
Super is not limited to the people on your payroll. The ATO is explicit that the label in the contract does not determine the relationship, and that you are responsible for classifying the worker correctly. You must pay super for a contractor engaged wholly or principally for their labour. Apprentices, trainees, labourers and trades assistants are always employees, while a company, trust or partnership you engage is a contractor. Timing makes this urgent: a labour-only contractor who is an employee for super purposes sits inside the same seven business day window as your permanent staff, so what was an exposure under the quarterly system is now a recurring, dated obligation.
Compliance work and advisory work are not the same thing
A compliance engagement produces an accurate historical record, lodged on time. For plenty of businesses that is all they need. What it cannot do is change the year it describes: by the time the file lands on a desk in October, the asset has been bought and the profit has been drawn.
Advisory work sits earlier. The conversation before the equipment purchase, the decision about how profits are drawn, the forecasting that shows a tight quarter in February instead of June, and a virtual CFO once a business needs someone in the numbers monthly. A sole trader with one income stream and no staff does not need management reporting. That changes when other people’s money starts moving through the business: staff, stock, finance, a lease.
Timing an asset purchase is an advisory decision, not a compliance one
A business with an aggregated turnover under $10 million that applies the simplified depreciation rules can claim an immediate deduction for an asset costing less than $20,000, first used or installed ready for use on or after 1 July 2023. The word doing the work is aggregated: it takes in the turnover of any entities that are your affiliates or connected with you, measured on gross income rather than profit, so an owner running two entities can sit over a threshold they thought they were under.
Three more things decide whether a purchase lands well or badly, and none can be fixed afterwards. The trigger is the date the asset is first used or installed ready for use, not when you ordered it or paid the deposit, so a machine in a crate on 30 June does not qualify. The limit is tested against the total cost rather than your business-use share: a ute bought for $40,000 and used 40% for business fails on its $40,000 price, and the business portion goes into the small business pool instead. And the limit is tied to the income year and has moved repeatedly, so the right figure is the one for the year the asset is first used.
When a sole trader should start thinking about a company
The usual triggers are risk, staff, and profits you are not drawing. If you are signing contracts with liability attached, employing people, or consistently making more than you and your family take out, the question stops being theoretical. That is the point to get business structuring advice, which is far cheaper before the transaction than after it.
A company also brings an ASIC annual review fee, its own financial statements and its own tax return every year it exists, and that cost does not scale down in a quiet year. For a sole trader with modest profits and no real liability exposure, the structure often does not yet earn its keep.
The company rate has a second limb
The 25% company tax rate has a test attached. A company pays it only if its aggregated turnover is under $50 million and no more than 80% of its assessable income is base rate entity passive income, which includes rent, interest, dividends and net capital gains. Companies failing either condition pay 30% on all of their income, not on the passive part alone.
It is a cliff rather than a slope. Take a company earning $60,000 of consulting fees, $280,000 of rent and $20,000 of interest. Passive income is $300,000 of $360,000, about 83%, so the full $360,000 is taxed at 30% rather than 25%, consulting income included, at a cost of around $18,000 that year. It is one of the main reasons the entity carrying on the trading business and the entity holding the valuable assets are usually not the same entity.
Money inside a company is not your money yet
A company’s profits have been taxed once, at the company rate, and there is a further consequence when they come out. Taking company cash informally, as a loan or an unrecorded drawing, can be a Division 7A deemed dividend, generally unfranked, so it is taxed in your hands with no credit for the tax the company already paid.
A loan escapes that treatment on a complying loan agreement: in writing before the company’s lodgment day for the year the money was taken, interest at or above the ATO’s benchmark rate, and a maximum term of 7 years, or 25 where the whole loan is secured by a registered mortgage over property worth at least 110% of it. Our guide to how Division 7A works in practice covers the mechanics. The paperwork has to exist before the return is lodged, which makes this a conversation during the year rather than at the end.
The year two cash squeeze
Once your instalment income reaches $4,000, the tax on your latest assessment reaches $1,000 and estimated notional tax reaches $500, all three, the ATO enters you into PAYG instalments automatically. The bill for your first good year and the start of prepaying the current one land together, so you pay roughly two years of tax across twelve months. It is a large, predictable cash event that arrives without warning if nobody told you it was coming, and the most common reason a profitable small business has a bad quarter.
Why choose Crest Accountants
Crest has advised business owners since 1973, taking small businesses through several tax systems, two recessions and a pandemic. We are a registered tax agent, so your lodgments run under our agent program rather than the standard individual deadlines.
We are a full-service practice, so the person preparing your BAS is in the same building as the person advising on your structure, and the advice comes from people who will also be lodging under it. Our team holds a rating of 4.8 from more than 130 Google reviews, and the pattern in them is the same one we aim for: things explained clearly, and advice that arrives before the event rather than after it.
We are based at Burleigh Heads and act for businesses across Queensland and around Australia, in plain English, including the parts you will not like. Crest does not hold an Australian Financial Services Licence and does not provide financial product advice, so anything touching investments or personal financial products goes to a licensed financial adviser.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need an accountant as a sole trader?
You are not required to have one, and with a single income stream, few deductions and no staff, doing your own return is manageable. Once GST registration, employees, contractors or an investment asset are involved, one mistake or one missed concession tends to cost more than the fee.
Do I need a bookkeeper as well as an accountant?
Not necessarily. Bookkeeping is the day-to-day capture and reconciliation; the accounting work is the review, the lodgments, the year-end position and the advice. Some businesses run their own books in Xero or MYOB and bring us in above that, some hand the lot over, and both work. What does not work is nobody reconciling until June: rebuilding a year always costs more than maintaining it.
Can I change accountants partway through the year?
Yes, and there is no penalty for it. Your new agent requests your records from the previous one, and you nominate the new agent yourself in your ATO online account. One date is worth knowing: most registered tax agents can lodge returns after the usual 31 October deadline under their lodgment program, but a new agent needs to hear from you before 31 October to put you on theirs.
Do you only work with businesses on the Gold Coast?
No. The office is at Burleigh Heads and many clients are local, but we act for businesses throughout Queensland and around Australia. Documents come in through our secure upload page, reporting runs in the cloud, and meetings happen by phone or video, so location does not change what you get.
General advice disclaimerThe information on this page is general in nature and does not take into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs. It is not financial product advice. Before acting, seek advice from a registered tax agent or licensed financial adviser about your circumstances.
Call Crest Accountants on 07 5538 0999 or send an enquiry through the contact form, and tell us your structure and what you are trying to work out. We come back to you within 24 hours.
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