Benefits

Standard Business Reporting (SBR) will benefit Australian businesses in many ways.

By removing unnecessary and duplicated information from reporting forms, businesses will better understand what governments are asking for and spend less time and money reporting it.
Because the information businesses need to report will be clearer and more consistent with records businesses keep,
it will take less time and effort to assemble and analyse the information needed for reporting.
By using business software to automatically pre-fill government forms, businesses will save on data gathering and
re-keying of information.

SBR reduces the need for costly reporting professionals' services on low value-added activity (such as organising and
re-keying data), which makes it easier for businesses to prepare and lodge their own reports — with less need for specialist support.
Since reporting to government will be a by-product of natural business processes, the data used for both purposes will be more consistent and integrated, reducing the effort required for compliance checking and auditing.

SBR provides an electronic interface that enables businesses and reporting professionals to report to government agencies directly from their accounting software — with SBR there’s no need to go to agency portals or web sites to report to government.
Businesses will require only one secure sign-on to report to SBR agencies, in contrast to today’s situation where businesses face multiple registration processes, passwords and digital credentials in order to identify themselves.
Australian business will save around $800 million per year when SBR is fully operational.

SBR provides validation of reported information and confirmation of receipt of the submitted report. As a result, reporting error correction, and consequent delays and processing costs, will be minimised.
Businesses will have greater certainty and earlier closure of issues that require audit trails to be maintained.

Implementation impacts and costs will be minimised with SBR simplifying reporting requirements within existing regulatory frameworks. When financial reporting regulations do change for other reasons (e.g. due to changes in legislation), SBR will make it easier for business to adjust to the changes, due to free distribution of the updated SBR reporting definitions and certification material to software developers.
The introduction of a standard reporting language via SBR will encourage improvements to the range of features supported by business software. This will particularly benefit small businesses, which traditionally can’t make use of software with sophisticated accounting features.

The data held in SBR-enabled software will have consistent, computer-readable labels (i.e. tagged data) that include relevant elements of the international financial reporting standards. As a result, it will be easier for business owners and their advisors to generate and analyse a range of financial performance measures for the business in real time — information typically available only to larger businesses today. This will help business to make well-informed decisions, and provide managers with more control over their finances.
With tagged data, business will also be able to share their financial information with third parties (e.g. financial advisors, bankers, investors) where they choose to do so.

Businesses that operate across national boundaries will see better alignment of their reporting to Australian governments with reporting to other governments, as SBR adopts a common reporting language based on international standards and best practice.
The common reporting language will also support better access to potential investors because the business’s financial statements can be more readily analysed, and compared.