How to complete the BAS Online

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) have a very tiresome mandatory requirement for all business’s to submit a form every 3 months. The effect of the “Business Activity Statement” (BAS) is to tell the ATO how much they should bill you for; and they will chase you hard for the money that you’ve just told them that you owed them, so be prepared to pay it.

At its simplest, the BAS is a statement of how much money you’ve “withheld” from employees wages on the basis of tax.

The toughest part of this process varies: sometimes it will be getting the actual form from the ATO, sometimes it will be filling it out.

Getting the BAS form

You can’t just walk down to post office and get the form to fill out and send it in. No. The form you submit must be sent, signed, and issued specifically to your business from the ATO for each specific period. They’re all uniquely identifiable and, in my experience, obtaining the form is more work than filling it out. You can do it this by pen, paper, and stamp, or by computer.

The paper version is the simplest. They mail the form to you and you mail it back. This option hasn’t worked for me because my mailing address hasn’t been particularly stable is late or missing forms create major pains explaining and re-issuing, plus I’m single-bloody-minded about achieving a paperless office. You can also expect the ATO to make the paper option increasingly difficult over time as they don’t want to deal with paper either.

But by computer is a major pain because

1. you have to jump through numerous hoops to obtain, install, and maintain the digital “certificates”, and
2. the target computer system is a restrictive and narrow specification

Getting your ‘key’s

1. Find yourself a speakerphone and dial the ATO on 13 28 66. After following 5 minutes worth of prompts you’ll get to spend something between 20 and 50 minutes on hold.
2. When get a human, they’ll go through all that rigmarole of identifying you, thence finally you can request they issue a digital certificate to you.

This will result in an email AND something in the mail about 14 days later. You may also receive a phone call from the ATO about a week after the initial request asking if and/or why you want one.

Once you’ve got all this you can try and use them…

Start with Windows XP

I tried to do all this today with Windows 7 (x64) and it simply doesn’t work. From talking to technical support it sounded like it may very likely not work on Vista either. The reason, I’ve decided, is that their website MUST be able to run a JAVA Virtual Machine on your computer in order to complete the process. So to cut a longer story shorter…

I’ve resorted to a Virtual Machine using a base install of Windows XP, and following the bits and pieces provided I’ve been able to get the CSI installed and keys all working.

Install CSI

This is a piece of software when encrypts and “signs” the forms you send and receive from the ATO. Aside from the obvious security benefits, one of the key features to note is “non-repudiation”; it makes it very difficult to deny you sent that form with those numbers on it. But lets not digress

Open the browser and go to this page and install the software downloaded.

http://csi.business.gov.au/

Get the certificates

As instructed in the email open the browser (MSIE6, not chrome, not MSIE8) and go to:

http://pki.ato.gov.au/certificate/install/

and select “PIN/Password”, dismiss the pop-up (run the java applet), click Next, and you should be presented with a login “DIGITAL CERTIFICATE INSTALLATION” asking for your ABN, Password, and Access Code.

If, instead, you get this error message, and you’ve just installed the darn thing, then the java application is not working and you’re going to have to find a way to make it work, or give up. My solution is the virtual machine…

“The CSI is not installed on this computer or is out of date.
You will now be re-directed to install the latest version of this software.
You can use our program when you have this installed.”

These are NOT both the keys on paper “PIN LETTER” but bring together the paper, the email, and your company.

• ABN you should know
• Password is ON THE PAPER MAIL SLIP they sent you
• Access Code is IN THE EMAIL they sent you

Fun isn’t it

Further points of failure which might make your day… so take special care:

EVERYTHING IS CASE SENSITIVE

You’ve triple checked from all the bits and bobs you’ve been given that you’re banging in the correct passwords to the correct boxes, you’re certain as far as you can tell despite being obscured by asterix’s.

Check the CAPSLOCK. You probably want to turn it on since they use uppercase in all these things.

YOU CAN ONLY DOWNLOAD THE CERTIFICATE ONCE

If you somehow delete it before you install the certificate or move computer then you have to start all over again, by requesting a new one, waiting an hour on hold, waiting a couple of weeks for it to arrive, finding the time and motivation to tackle it again, etc, etc.

Go get your BAS form

Congratuations. By some genius, monumental patience and persistance, you’ve managed to get this far.

If you were doing this a year ago you’ll find they’ve discarded the standalone java application which we used to do all the form filling and submitting with; and intead we’re completing the form directly into the browser; (but still doing the signing with the CSI java application!?).

Finally you can obtain and complete your BAS form by going to the “ATO BUSINESS PORTAL”.

https://bp.ato.gov.au/

Click “continue” and “login” and the java signature signing application should come up.

In the application popup you can click “Sign” and then enter a password.

Entering the PASSWORD

This password is NOT the password you got in the mail.
This password is NOT the password you got in the email.
This password IS one that it asked you for, and you entered twice, possibly whilst you still had the CAPSLOCK on, somewhere back when you downloaded and installed the certificate!

Let’s hope you were very particular about entering it right and making sure you could remember it, because if you can’t get it right, guess where you’re going? Yes. Back to the beginning. Start all over again. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200…

After all this, you might actually have a chance to complete your BAS.

Filling out the BAS

Once I’ve worked out what I have to do, it turns out my BAS is astonishingly simple. Unfortunately I have to work out what to do every three months because I’ve usually forgotten enough to have no confidence in what I’m doing.

That’s why I’m writing this down.

For me I just have to tell them how much I paid out in wages, and how much I kept on the justification of “TAX Withheld”.

W1

This is how much I spent on wages.

• IT DOES NOT INCLUDE SUPERANNUATION
• IT DOES INCLUDE TAX WITHHELD

So if you have one employee and the GROSS salary paid to them was $15,000 excluding super then I enter in $15,000 at W1. If I paid myself a salary as well then I add that to it.

W2

This is the money that you ‘promised’ the employee you would send to the Tax Office on their behalf.
This is how much you ‘retained’, or ‘held back’, in Tax.
This is how much the ATO is immediately going to send an invoice to you for, or at least offset against the installments you sent during the quarter.

T1

The Income Tax Installment seems to be a mechanism devised by the ATO to try and balance out anomalies, in turn ensuring that you don’t fall behind on your payments. I’m thinking of it as the tax “budget” and a measure of your “actual” to date versus your “budget” to date.

To my experience, it’s a pain-in-the-arse because if things change such that your tax bill drops substantially the ATO will nonetheless chase you for money which they’ll only wind up returning after the end-of-year return.

But it is a required field.

So my solution to the Instalment is to enter ZERO at T1. And always keep on top of the actual payments.

Submit

Stumble your way through the declarations and finally submit.

Print and retain

To keep myself paperless, but conform to a papered world, I’ve been using a very useful little FREE program called “Bullzip PDF Printer”. It installs a “printer” on XP which looks like a printer to all your applications, but actually saves the printout to a PDF file.

http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php

So at this point I can go back and “print” the activity statement, save it as a PDF, and “archive” on my long-term storage.

See, now, wasn’t that a simple and cheap way to invest a vast chunk of your hard-earned money on schools, roads, laws, police, fire, hospitals, customs, defense forces, and an 81 metre high stainless steel flagpole?

Thought so.