Year End and Tax Return Process

A financial year has two steps, and they run in this order. This page is the route through them, for you and for any assistant working through the Beeswax connector.

Step 1: review the books

The year-end review (Reports → Tax Returns, Step 1) checks the year's books before any tax figure is relied on. Work through it from the top, because later checks depend on earlier ones: a balance sheet can't be trusted until the bank agrees.

1. Set-up: business details, last year's return, and last year's closing balances.
2. Bank: every account agrees to its statement at year end, and every bank line is allocated.
3. GST: every Business Activity Statement is lodged and locked.
4. Payroll, debtors and creditors, assets.
5. Loans and equity, including Division 7A for a company.
6. The profit and loss and the balance sheet.
7. Year-end adjustments: prepayments, accruals, depreciation and income tax.

Red checks stop the return being finalised until they're fixed, or a reviewer signs them off as they stand with a note. Amber checks are worth a look and don't block anything.

Step 2: the tax return

Create the return once every Business Activity Statement for the year is locked. It takes its figures from the ledger, so fix a wrong figure in the ledger and repopulate the return, rather than typing over it. See Tax Returns.

Who does what

Some steps are always a person's, on the web. No token or assistant can do them:

• signing off a review check, and recording a decision on one
• locking a Business Activity Statement or the year
• confirming a section of the return, finalising it, or unlocking it

Lodging happens outside Beeswax.

Working through the connector

1. Call get_tax_workflow_status for the year. Its next_actions list says what to do next, in order, and whether each step is for the connector, for a person on the web, or outside Beeswax.
2. Call get_year_end_review, then get_year_end_review_check for each check you work on. It lists the items behind the figure.
3. Use trial_balance, profit_and_loss and balance_sheet for totals by account. Use list_account_transactions with summary: true for one account's totals, and without it only when you need the lines.
4. Propose fixes to the owner. When a year-end entry needs an account that doesn't exist, add it with create_transaction_account, with a tax return label if it's an expense or income account.
5. Stage journals with create_manual_journal and status: "draft". Delete a stray draft with delete_manual_journal. A finalised journal can't be deleted through the connector: post a reversing journal instead.
6. Record what you found with add_year_end_review_note, then tell the owner which steps above are theirs.

Only count entries where posted is true.

Known limitations

• trial_balance runs from the start of the financial year holding the date, as the web report does when given a single date. Beeswax posts no year-end close, so the debit and credit totals differ by earlier years' profit. That isn't an error: balance_sheet shows it as retained earnings, and its discrepancy says whether the ledger balances.
• balance_sheet leaves out inactive accounts, as the web report does, so an inactive account with a balance shows as a discrepancy.
• profit_and_loss on the cash basis works through every payment in the period, so a long period on a busy account can time out. Use shorter periods if it does.
• Foreign-currency invoices and expenses aren't checked for balance when they're finalised.
• The connector can't change an account's type, set up a bank account or set an opening balance. Those stay on the Chart of Accounts page.