End of financial year prep is the work that closes off a client’s books for the year to 30 June and gets everything ready for the accountant or tax agent. For an Australian firm it pulls together a lot of separate threads at once: reconciling bank, loan and credit card accounts, squaring away GST and the final BAS, finalising Single Touch Payroll, checking super has been paid, and producing a clean set of reports the tax agent can work from. Done well, it is the difference between a smooth lodgement and weeks of back-and-forth queries.
The trouble is EOFY lands at the same time for every client, so the work stacks up fast. When the process lives in one person’s head or a different spreadsheet for each job, steps get skipped, STP finalisations slip past their date, and you discover missing statements only after the accountant asks for them. A consistent year-end close process keeps every job running the same way no matter who picks it up.
When to run it
Kick this off around 30 June, once the final pay runs for the year are done. The job owner (usually the bookkeeper or accountant managing the file) drives it through to the point where reports are ready for the tax agent. Some steps, such as finalising STP and lodging the final BAS, run to ATO due dates, so start early rather than waiting for the books to be perfectly clean.
How to run it in Tidyflow
Set this up once as a reusable job template. Each step on the checklist becomes a subtask your team ticks off, so the same workflow repeats across every client and nothing gets dropped. Because EOFY happens every year, schedule the job to recur annually so it generates itself each June without anyone remembering to create it.
The items you need from clients (missing statements, asset purchases, super confirmations, report sign-off) go out as client requests in the portal. Clients upload directly against each request, the documents land on the job, and you can see at a glance who still owes you what instead of chasing by email.
Common pitfalls
- Leaving STP finalisation until the last minute. Employee year-to-date figures need to reconcile to the payroll system before you lodge the declaration.
- Treating super as paid when it has only been accrued. Confirm contributions have actually cleared before signing off the year.
- Skipping a reconciliation of GST collected and paid against BAS totals, which hides coding errors that surface later.
- Forgetting to lodge or reconcile a prior BAS period, so the final BAS does not tie back to the ledger.
- Handing reports to the tax agent without supporting workpapers (loan schedules, depreciation, payroll summaries) gathered in one place.