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taxes

Tracking GST and Lodging BAS Online

By QuickBooks Australia

Published on May 15, 20242 min read

If you’re self-employed and have a GST turnover of $75,000 or more a year, or drive for Uber or another taxi or rideshare service, you will need to keep records of income and expenses for both GST and income tax purposes and you will need to lodge a BAS with the ATO.

To lodge and pay your BAS you need to do 3 things:

1) Keep track of GST on sales and purchases

2) Calculate what you owe (or let QuickBooks Self-Employed do it for you)

3) Lodge and pay your BAS with the ATO

1. Track GST

In order to lodge a BAS with the ATO monthly, quarterly or yearly, you need to continuously track your GST. You need to keep a record of:

Total sales with GST
GST on sales
GST on purchases

To avoid mountains of paperwork, you can use the QuickBooks Self-Employed mobile app to automatically track your GST.

Watch the video below to learn how to track GST with QuickBooks Self-Employed.

QuickBooks Self-Employed mobile app being used to automatically track GST

2. Calculate how much you owe

When it’s time to lodge your BAS, you’ll need to calculate your total income and expenses with GST, including:

How much money you’ve made (total sales with GST)
How much GST you owe (GST on sales)
Any tax deductions (GST on purchases)

If you’ve been using QuickBooks Self-Employed to track your GST, you can request a tax summary which will automatically calculate the numbers for you, so you don’t have to sort through endless paperwork or crunch numbers at tax time.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to get your Tax Summary from QuickBooks Self-Employed.

Screenshot showing how to pull report in Quickbooks

3. Lodge and pay your BAS

You then need to lodge your BAS via the ATO’s online business portal. You can choose to engage a BAS Agent to lodge on your behalf, or use a service like Airtax.*

Airtax can use your QuickBooks Self-Employed GST report to automatically fill out your BAS for you in minutes. You can also learn where you may be missing out on deductions. QuickBooks Self-Employed customers can lodge their first BAS free via Airtax (usually $49). Find out more about pricing and terms of the offer here.

Finally, you will need to pay your BAS with the ATO.

*Airtax is provided by PriceWaterhouse Coopers, which is not affiliated with Intuit.

More information

Find more information about GST and BAS from the ATO.
Watch QuickBooks Self-Employed how-to videos.
Find out more business tips and advice from QuickBooks Self-Employed.

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