Australian tax time: from bank statement PDFs to a lodged return

The financial year closed on 30 June, the ATO's pre-fill data has landed, and if you lodge your own return the deadline is 31 October. Through a registered tax agent you get longer — typically well into next year — but only if you're on their books by 31 October, and agents like clients who arrive with records rather than intentions. Either way, the job between now and then is the same: get a year of bank transactions into a form that a return can be built from. Here's the route.

What the return actually needs from your bank

For a sole trader, business income and expenses go on the business schedule of your individual return — there's no separate company return. That schedule wants totals: income, cost of sales, and expenses by type. Every one of those totals is a sum of bank transactions, which means the real task is:

1. Every transaction from every business account, 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026.
2. Each one categorised.
3. Proof the list is complete.

The third is the one people skip. A return built on a transaction list that's missing a page is a return that's wrong, and you won't know which way.

Gather the statements

List every account the business touched: the trading account, savings, any credit card, PayPal or Stripe if you sell online, and a loan account if there is one. For each, you want twelve monthly statements (or four quarterly), plus July 2026's, because the June card charges and the last supplier payment clear after the year end.

Download them as PDFs from online banking now — the big four keep a few years available, but the retrieval process for older or closed accounts is slow enough that you don't want to discover a gap in late October. Password-protected statements are fine as they are.

Convert them

You could type them. Twelve statements at four pages each is about fifty pages per account — hours of keying, plus the errors that come with it. Convert them instead: NoRekey turns each statement into CSV, Excel or OFX, and verifies every conversion against the statement's own opening and closing balances before you download — so the complete-list problem is solved at the source. It handles Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Westpac, NAB and the rest, scanned or digital.

Get them into your software

If you use accounting software, import the converted files rather than re-keying into it:

• Xero — CSV into the bank account via Accounting → Bank accounts → Import a statement. Importing into Xero has the column layout.
• MYOB Business — Banking → Bank transactions → Import statement; MYOB accepts OFX, QIF and CSV. OFX skips the column mapping.
• QuickBooks Online — Transactions → Bank transactions → Upload from file, CSV or OFX. Importing into QuickBooks.

Import month by month, in order, and watch the software's running balance against the statement's closing balance after each one. They'll match if the conversions balanced; if you've been importing all year from a bank feed and only need to fill a gap, backfilling a feed is the same process with fewer files.

If you don't use software — many sole traders don't, and don't need to — a spreadsheet per account with a category column does the job. The minimal sole trader system is built exactly this way.

Categorise with the return in mind

The expense lines a sole trader's return asks for are the buckets to use: motor vehicle, rent, interest, depreciation, repairs, contractor and employee costs, superannuation, and "all other expenses" with your own subtotals underneath. Categorise bank rows straight into them and the return's totals fall out of a pivot table.

A few things the bank statement reminds you of that people forget:

• Motor vehicle — fuel, rego, insurance and servicing are in the statement. Whether you claim actual costs or cents per kilometre is a question for the return; tag them either way, and keep the logbook if you want the actual-cost method.
• Home office — the fixed-rate method is an hourly figure rather than a statement line, but the phone, internet and electricity bills that support the alternative are all in there.
• Superannuation — personal contributions you intend to claim need a notice lodged with your fund before you lodge the return. The bank statement tells you the amount and date.
• Equipment — anything that might qualify for the instant asset write-off goes on its own list for your agent, not into "repairs".
• Interest and fees — on a business loan or card, deductible; on the personal card you used twice for stock, apportioned.

And the non-expenses that catch-up bookkeeping mistakes for expenses: transfers between your own accounts, card repayments, drawings, loan principal, and anything personal. Tag them so they're visibly excluded rather than silently.

Reconcile, then lodge or hand over

For each account: 1 July opening balance plus every transaction equals 30 June closing balance. Income cross-checked against invoices and, if you're registered, against the four BAS you lodged during the year (the first BAS of the new year, for the July–September quarter, is due 28 October — the same converted statements feed it). Totals by category on one summary sheet.

If you lodge yourself, that sheet is the business schedule. If you use an agent, send the sheet, the converted files and the PDFs, and they'll have your return ready in days rather than asking for "the bank statements" in a series of emails through November.

Keep everything for five years from lodgement; the retention rules are longer than the bank's archive. And convert next year's statements as they arrive, a month at a time — July's is already sitting in your online banking, and it takes less time to convert than it took to read this.