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BAS Facts

Personalised Business Activity Statements (BAS) are provided by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to businesses in order for them to report their taxation obligations such as: goods and services tax (GST), luxury car tax (LCT), fuel tax credits, wine equalisation tax (WET), pay-as-you-go (PAYG) withholding and instalments, fringe benefits tax (FBT) instalments and deferred company instalments.

The BAS includes information depending on what conditions are determined when going into business such as:

• activity statement period coverage
• document ID (a unique number assigned on generation of each activity statement)
• Australian Business Number
• due dates for lodgement and payment (these are usually the similar, but can be dissimilar if there is an arrangement for an additional amount of time)
• business name and address information, as stated on the Australian business register
• GST accounting method
• GST instalment amount (if applicable)
• deferred company / fund instalment amount (if applicable)
• the period you are reporting for each obligation
• PAYG ‘ATO instalment rate’ or varied rate or the ‘ATO instalment amount’
• FBT instalment amount calculated by the Tax Office (if applicable)

There are different ways of lodging your BAS – by mail, through a tax agent or BAS service provider or online using the business portal. For those who lodge by mail, the original BAS must be submitted, not a copy or computer generated version of it.

An extension of two weeks is given to those who lodge using the business portal and report quarterly. The business portal, mostly suited for larger companies, bookkeepers and other specialised professionals, is a software application developed by the ATO. Through the business portal, you can lodge online and edit most types of activity statements.  Another advantage is being able to access previous BAS’s and view the status of your statement. By registering to AUSkey, the government’s online security system, you can gain entry to the business portal and will be able to deal quickly with all of the correspondence.

The due date for lodging and payment will be on your BAS, but to serve as a reminder – if you report monthly, the first two months of each quarter are due on the 21^st of the following month and the last month which is the end-of-quarter is due on the 28^th of the following month. Should the due date fall on a weekend or a public holiday, the deadline will then be the next business day.

written by:

McKinley Plowman