SBR is making it easier to lodge your reports

In 2010, the Australian government launched an initiative to simplify business reporting obligations, by enabling the accounting software to populate information from various government reports to save businesses time and ensure they’re reporting correctly. This initiative was called Standard Business Reporting, or SBR.

If you’re new to accounting software, or have only used it from 2010 onwards, the best way to understand what SBR means is to compare a paper tax return with an electronic one.

On a paper forms, there are bunches of fields you need to fill out; some of them will relate to your business while others won’t. How you know what areas you need to complete depends on your answers to previous questions and your own circumstances.

With a paper form, it’s up to you to sort of which questions apply and which don’t. With electronic ones, only the questions you need to answer appear onscreen.

What does the SBR standardise?

The ATO’s SBR initiative makes it easier to report and lodge business activity statements, fringe benefits tax, company and individual tax returns, capital gains tax, PAYG, and much, much more.

MYOB, Xero and QuickBooks online, along with many other business reporting systems, are SBR enabled, which means you can easily lodge most of the reports required by the ATO through your accounting or business reporting system.

Is Xero the best SBR-enabled system?

To check which reports you can complete with an SBR-enabled reporting system, see the ATO’s list on the SBR website.

It’s interesting to note that out of more than 60 reports, Xero appears on that list 20 times, as does MYOB’s accountant enterprise (AE) and accountant’s office suite (AO) systems; QuickBooks (listed as GovReports, the SBR-enabled integration QuickBooks uses) is listed 17 times.

However, an accounting system called Free Accounting Software (FAS) which as the name suggests, is FREE, is listed as much as 13 times; while Sage and Catsoft appear and 21 times and 31 times respectively.

It doesn’t matter that Quickbooks Online isn’t SBR-enabled

Even though Quickbooks itself isn’t SBR enabled it’s partner, GovReports, is. GovReports integrates seamlessly with the QuickBooks software, so for each of the reports that GovReports can pull data for automatically, QuickBooks users can easily and seamlessly complete and lodge their activity statements, tax returns, PAYG summaries, and more.

Quickbooks is the cloud accounting software operated by US-based company, Intuit. As an American company, it partners with other providers in the regions it operates in to ensure it’s compliant with local tax laws and processes. For example, QuickBooks isn’t SuperStream compliant either, however KeyPay is.

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