ATO INTEGRATED CLIENT ACCOUNT

 Hi GDay53,

I never knew the ATO actually told people about this but I have been trying to get that message across for ages.

Your accounts receivables and payables are actually Trade Debtors and Trade Creditors, the operative word here being TRADE! In  other words your suppliers and clients in the normal course of business.

Any ATO liability, whether for GST or Income Tax due or refundable is similar to a loan/refund due from a financial institution and should be shown in the balance sheet seperate from Trade accounts.

You can still set up a card as a supplier or customer (which means you can assign a default a/c) and make the liability or asset account set as a credit card or bank account type so you can do a spend money or receive money to it, which just makes it simpler to do than having to change both lines on the GJ entry.

Another big thing to remember in all this is that when the ATO give a remission of interest charged (which happens a lot) and offsets the GIC interest you need to record both these entries.

While it seems pointless and time consuming, I do know that come Income tax time and auto populating, all the remissions of interest come into the tax return as income, but oh my oh my, the actual interst charged does not populate as an expense.  How amazing!