Accounting and finance are one of the most highly regulated industries in Australia. Within these professions, the burden of compliance and reporting often fall into hands of bookkeepers, accountants, auditors and tax agents who are already overworked.This is why the Standard Business Reporting (SBR) program was a great idea to this industry. Initiated by the federal government and supported by accounting bodies such as the Certified Practicing Accountants(CPA) Australia. The basic principle of SBR is to save time and effort by reducing the red tape to Australian businesses.
More importantly the SBR program allows simplification to the processes that the accounting community need to do in order to submit to their reporting burden. For example, in order to lodge PAYG Annual Summaries, the process used to involve preparing the payment summary records, burning them to a CD, filling out a form and posting it to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). (Should the ATO have problems reading the files, this process can be repeated a number of times). Now, using GovReports which is a SBR enabled software – the report is sent directly to ATO in less than a minute.
Lodging a Business/Instalment Activity Statement (BAS/IAS) reporting process is further simplified by automated pre-fill of these forms from ATO. GovReports allows BAS/tax agents to prepare BAS/IAS forms and queue them up to be lodged later.
Perhaps the most important time saving feature of GovReports is that it is a cloud based solution. You can use GovReports from anywhere (and soon any tablet device). This frees businesses, accounting and bookkeeper professionals to work from anywhere and still meet their reporting burden quickly and simply. A brilliant example would be a GovReports international client based in Canada lodging their ASIC financial report (F405) for their business in Australia – that is what “government reporting made simple” is all about!
