Standard Business Reporting

Noble and Associates:

• Sarah Edwards
• Anh Le

Sarah: The first lodgement that we did using SBR, the whole office stood around the PC, and when the button was pressed and the lodgement was successful there was a ring of applause, and we all celebrated by going out to lunch. It was a milestone. The business was started 10 years ago. We provide tax compliance services and also business advisory services. We have the two directors, managing accountants, a supporting administration team and we also have some graduates.

Anh: My job here involves bringing documents in and loading them onto our computers, putting in data, entering data in most of our software – so it’s moving from one document to another.

Sarah: We have clients from a wide variety of business sectors, everything from individuals who need to lodge their individual tax returns, we have family trusts, people with companies and investments.

Anh: We range from tax returns, BAS, Instalment Activity Statements, and they come quarterly, monthly and yearly as well, so all the time we’ll be doing processes and lodging and compliance.

Sarah: The majority of time taken in the office is to complete compliance reports.

Anh: Previously there was a high risk of error. I mean, when you’re constantly going back and forth from one document to another, transferring data. I mean human error, you can reduce as much as you can but there will be some error. I think that’s where SBR comes in.

Sarah: SBR is Standard Business Reporting, which basically brings all the Australian government agencies together. All the information for any type of activity that needs to be reported to any government agency can be done in one place.

Anh: There’s no filling in documents, there’s no going back and forth plugging in numbers. It’s very, very simple.

Sarah: All you need is an AUSkey. The AUSkey is the one identity that an organisation needs to be able to report to any government organisation – federal or state.

Anh: I think with other portals you need, you know, different passwords, different codes and everything. With SBR it’s just the AUSkey and that’s it. The best thing about SBR would probably be that it’s very efficient. You just use one screen and your all your data’s on there. You don’t have to go back and forth to documents and flip through pages. Everything’s just very quick.

Sarah: You’ll be able to report any activity statements and also financials and tax returns, payroll reporting responsibilities and anything that you need to report to a government agency.

Anh: With the BAS and IAS, compared to previously, SBR would probably save about the half the time really, because you’re not going back and forth to different documents.

Sarah: SBR software will prefill the information into forms, which already have prefilled information from the different government agencies. So all the information will be integrated into one form, and lodged in one place.

Anh: It’s very quick to use SBR. Compared to previously, most of it was paper forms, so filling out and then manually lodging. So yeah, it was quite time consuming. Were moving from something that’s very paper-based to paperless basically.

Sarah: It will free up time for accountants to be able to spend more time with clients on the business advisory side. It’s a one-stop shop.

Last updated: 04 Apr 2013
Page ID: 7887