Records checklists and interview notes for personal returns for 2025 are now available for download.

Send the records checklists to clients to make sure you get all the information you need to prepare their return and avoid time wasting requests for missing information. There are two records checklist options; a simple one-page checklist and a six-page checklist on which the client can record information. Choose the version that best suits the needs of your practice.

Use the interview notes when you are only collecting information for the client’s return. This form lists each return item alongside which you can make any relevant notes to help with the preparation of the return at a later time.

Click on the links below to preview and download each of these forms.

Records Short
Forms/Records – Personal Return Short

Records Long
Forms/Records – Personal Return Long

Interview
Interview – Tax Return

This handy worksheet will help you calculate gross income and net assets for a sophisticated investor certificate.

Find it at Calculations/Financial/Sophisticated Investor

Our trust distributions calculator has been designed to help you calculate tax-effective distributions by your discretionary trust clients. You can use it for both non-streaming and streaming distributions.

The process involves estimating net income of the trust for tax purposes, calculating tax-effective distributions to beneficiaries and converting those amounts to accounting distributions for the resolution.

You can view the marginal tax rates for all beneficiaries based on their non-trust income. The calculator will then show how much income is available at those marginal tax rates, allowing you to use the lowest tax rates first.

Once distributions for tax purposes have been determined and the corresponding accounting distributions calculated, you can complete the trustee resolution which is part of the file.

And when it comes to preparing the trust tax return, you input actual figures to the worksheet and the various components of those distributions will be calculated for each beneficiary and return form item.

Find it at Calculations/2025/Trust Distributions

Our new Tax Money calculator is designed to help your small business clients keep a real-time estimate of future BAS, income tax and payroll related payments.

Identifying these amounts at their taxing point will help clients avoid spending funds that aren’t truly available. And, they could be “parked” in a separate high-interest savings account, or even a mortgage offset account in the case of a sole trader with a mortgage, until the payment is due.

Cashflow is the lifeblood of any business and tax payments are a significant part of cashflow. A recent CreditorWatch analysis revealed that 33% of businesses (1,715 out of 5,097) with tax debts over $100,000 had become insolvent or voluntarily closed over the previous 12 months.

Many small business clients lack the necessary resources, time or know-how to project their future tax payments and need your help.

If you already do the client’s bookkeeping, then using this calculator would fit in nicely with your services. Othewise the client could feed you the information on a regular basis or you could set up the calculator with opening balances and give it to the client for data entry.

These would be the ideal client types who would benefit from having their tax payments managed –

• New businesses without a PAYG instalment rate.
• Growing businesses.
• Clients who generally struggle to meet their ongoing tax obligations.

This is the process followed by the calculator in tracking tax payments –

1. Enter Opening Balances of unpaid amounts at the start date.
2. Enter summarised transactions from the start date to produce Estimates
3. Enter Actuals when the forms are prepared and they replace the Estimates
4. Enter Payments when made and the balance of “Tax Money” is calculated to compare with available funds.

Find it at Calculations/Budgets & Projections/Tax Money

This calculator has been updated with the latest ATO benchmarks from 2023 returns published in 2025.

Find it at Calculations/2024/Benchmarks

Whether you need to prepare an FBT return, or simply calculate the value of benefits for an employee contribution, our FBT files have you covered. The full set of working papers can be used for all employer and benefit types. These are the files for 2025 which are now available for download –

Excel Files
(a) FBT 2025. Full set of working papers.
(b) FBT Cars. Stand-alone calculator for cars only.
(c) FBT Reportable Benefits. Stand-alone calculator for reportable benefits only.

Letters
(a) FBT Return. Request details for FBT return and send with Forms (a) and (b).
(b) FBT Accounts. Request details for accounts only and send with Form (a).
(c) FBT Return Sign. Covering letter to send with the client’s FBT return for signature

Forms
(a) FBT All Benefits Checklist. List of potential taxable benefits. Send with Letters (a) and (b).
(b) FBT Car Benefits Schedule. Details of car benefits only. Send with Letter (a).

Our tax planning calculator for 2025 is now available for download. And you can view a video demonstration on YouTube here.

Use this workbook to help with tax planning opportunities for your clients. The important features of this calculator include –

• Analyse part year accounts and where they were prepared by your client, adjust for any errors to arrive at a true profit for the period.
• To calculate projected annual profit use 3 options –
  • Annualise YTD profit; or
  • Enter details of projected income and expenses to the end of the year; or
  • Enter a summary of projected income and expenses to the end of the year.
• Adjust the projected annual profit for tax reconciliation items and calculate taxable/net income.
• Calculate projected marginal tax rates (MTRs) and income available at those rates for both the client and all related parties, including partners and beneficiaries where applicable.
• Project allocations of taxable/net income and/or make deductible payments to related parties tax-effectively using the lowest MTRs and income available at those rates.

Find it at Calculations/2025/Tax Planning

Updated – User Request

New columns have been added to this calculation to enable identification of franking credits that are not claimable under the holding period rule. You have the option of showing or hiding these new columns. Also enter franking credits received through partnerships and trusts to compare the client’s total franking credits with the small shareholder exemption threshold. Data entry has been streamlined to assume that all dividends qualify for the exemption and simply enter holding dates for the exception(s) to the rule.

Note: this calculator is not compatible with Excel versions 2021 and prior.

Calculations/2024/Dividend Calculations

The ATO is watching your professional clients to see if they comply with the guidelines in PCG 2021/4 when allocating profits to individual practitioners. These guidelines apply to professional firms which include, but are not limited to, accounting, architecture, engineering, financial services, law, medicine and management consulting.

Direct quotes from the guidelines include –

• Para 25 – they “expect you to annually assess your eligibility to apply this Guideline” and “If you want to apply this Guideline, we expect you to document your assessment of, and also to review, your eligibility as your business or arrangement changes.”
• Para 107 – they will “”monitor outcomes over a period of time”
• Para 111 – they “may fact-check your assessment of your profit allocation. If you are unable to provide evidence to support your assessment, we may undertake further compliance activity.”

This new calculator will help you to assess any risk associated with profit allocations among your professional clients. The important features of this workbook include –

1. It has a procedures checklist to assist with the process and to check on the client’s eligibility to apply the guidelines;
2. You can do an actual risk assessment for 2024;
3. And if any issues are found, you can project an assessment for 2025 with a view to making adjustments to future allocations of profit;
4. You can use just one file to assess the risk for any number of practitioners within the same firm, from one to all;
5. Automatic calculations are performed for income tax, FBT and superannuation contributions tax;
6. For guidance, the file includes a sample assessment showing how to enter data for most situations; and
7. You can copy suggested text explaining the guidelines and the client’s risk rating and paste it into an outgoing email or letter to your client.

Click here to see a video demonstration of this calculation.

This calculator cannot be used for the old guidelines suspended in 2017.

Calculations/2024/Professional Profits

There is a new menu item in our Calculations module with specific help on the following procedures which will help you get the most out of using our Excel files –

• Embedding PDF documents into your file;
• Macros (downloading and using our files);
• Using multiple windows;
• Pasting or importing Excel data;
• Pasting screen shots;
• Printing our files;
• Using tables in JobPaper files; and
• Checking your version of Excel.

Calculations/About Using Excel

There are 2 new items with ATO information in the Library module providing quick answers to common questions about rental property deductions.

Capital Allowances vs Capital Works 2024
Browse through the long list of assets in Table 3 of the ATO’s 2024 rental property guide to determine if you should claim depreciation or a capital works deduction. For depreciable items you can also see their effective life.

Library/Rental Properties/Capital Allowances vs Capital Works 2024

Repair or Capital 2024
View the ATOs quick reference guide covering repairs, maintenance and capital expenditure on rental properties. See common scenarios, likely treatment and an example of the following –

• Repairs
• Maintenance
• Depreciation
• Second hand depreciating assets
• Improvements
• Initial repairs

Library/Rental Properties/Repair or Capital 2024

These lodgement dashboards are now available for download. Using our dashboards will allow you to import a lodgement report from the ATO and matching data from your practice management system to produce an interactive dashboard capable of viewing data with multiple filters. You have a choice of up to 3 user-defined reporting levels.  Click here to see a video demonstration of these files.

Here is a summary of the features in each file –

User request

Use this cashflow forecast to project weekly receipts and payments over a 12 month period. Along with our monthly version, their features include –

• Commence the forecast in any month or week based on user input;
• Automatic calculation of GST owing to the ATO;
• Minimum cash balance warning;
• Input totals for actual receipts and payments at the end of each month or week to automatically update forecasts of closing cash balances in future periods;
• KPIs including total net cash received and minimum, maximum and average cash balances over the period are displayed at the top of the sheet for easy reference; and
• Handy graphs illustrating Net Cash Flow and Cash Balance for each month or week.

Calculations/Budgets & Projections/Cashflow Forecast

Records Checklists

New records checklists for 2024 returns have now been uploaded to Forms.  One constant challenge when preparing personal returns is getting all of the information you need up front.  Delays in completing returns breeds inefficiency, increases the time you spend on the job and ultimately affects cashflow.  There are two versions of these checklists.

A short one page version is a checklist that the client can use to either get ready for their meeting with you or to be reminded of the information you need if there will be no meeting.  Send this checklist to your clients before the job commences to ensure that there are no missing records.

The longer six page version is a fillable form that will allow the client to record all relevant information and send it to you without the need for a formal meeting.  Be selective about which clients receive this longer version.

Interview Notes

This form will serve as a checklist of the items to be considered when you prepare a personal return face to face.  One important use of this form is to ask the client to complete the “income” section of the form, with a Yes or No answer, while they wait in reception for your meeting. This will remind them of income they may have received and importantly be confirmation of their instructions to you about their income for the preparation of their return.

All forms are available for download from our site as either a Microsoft Word document, to allow you to edit the form to suit the particular needs of your practice, or as a PDF document.

Forms

Change to layout.  All calculations can now be viewed on one screen.

Calculations/2024/Asset Acquisition

New Layout  New Video

Analyse a proposed rental property acquisition by your client and advise on –

• Pre and post tax cashflow
• Weekly cost to the client for affordability
• Gross and net rental yield
• Equity at any point in the analysis period
• Investment return over the ownership period (whether still held or sold)

Or in the case of a negatively-geared property, use hypothetical information to profile an ideal property to match the client’s excess cashflow.  Tax rates have been updated for the 2025 financial year.

Calculations/Budgets & Projections/Property Investment Analysis

This handy calculator will help you estimate rental income and deductions, interest on investment loans, motor vehicle expenses and depreciation on related assets for 2025 for a PAYG withholding variation.  This year, all calculations are now in this one file.

Calculations/2025/PAYG Withholding Variations

You can now start using this calculator part way through the term of the loan by entering a start year and balance at the beginning of that year.  This update will help users move existing loans across from a different calculator.

Calculations/Division 7A Loans