BAS due dates and how to prepare without the last-minute scramble

If you lodge quarterly, the July to September quarter is due on 28 October. The other three quarterly dates are 28 February, 28 April and 28 July. Monthly lodgers have until the 21st day of the month after the period ends. Those dates come from the ATO’s due dates for lodging and paying your BAS page. The dates themselves are the same every year, with one wrinkle covered below when one lands on a weekend or a public holiday.

What makes BAS feel like a burden is almost never the form. It is doing three months of bookkeeping in the two days before the form is due.

General information, not tax advice. The ATO is the authority - see ato.gov.au or ask a registered tax or BAS agent.

The quarterly dates

• Quarter 1 covers July, August and September, and is due 28 October.
• Quarter 2 covers October, November and December, and is due 28 February.
• Quarter 3 covers January, February and March, and is due 28 April.
• Quarter 4 covers April, May and June, and is due 28 July.

Three things about that list are worth knowing.

Quarter 2 already has a month built in. Its period ends on 31 December but it is not due until 28 February, and the ATO notes that a later lodgment and payment date does not apply to quarter 2 for that reason. So the extensions that exist elsewhere do not stack onto the Christmas quarter.

If a due date falls on a weekend or a public holiday, the ATO says you have until the next business day to lodge and pay. Given 28 April and 28 July both land near public holidays in some years, it is worth checking rather than assuming.

Lodging online may make you eligible for an extra two weeks on a quarterly BAS. That concession is linked from the same due dates page, with its own terms, and it applies to lodging and paying rather than to one or the other.

Monthly lodgers

The due date for a monthly BAS is the 21st day of the month following the end of the taxable period. A July monthly BAS is due 21 August.

Monthly reporting is compulsory where GST turnover is $20 million or more, and the ATO can also direct a business onto it. Below that figure it is available by choice, and the benefits the ATO lists are smaller and more manageable payments and better alignment with existing processes. The practical trade-off is twelve small routines instead of four larger ones. For a sole trader with a tidy system, monthly can genuinely be easier, because a month of transactions is still recognisable and three months of them are not.

What changes when an agent lodges

If a registered tax or BAS agent lodges for you, the ATO’s due dates page says you may get extra time and that different dates may apply. Those concessional dates run through the agent’s own arrangements with the ATO rather than attaching to you directly, so the date that matters is the one your agent gives you, and it is worth asking them early rather than assuming it applies.

Two things do not change. The extra time is time to lodge and pay, not time to prepare, and your agent still needs your records at roughly the original date to do the work. And an agent is doing classification and lodgment, not reconstruction: turning up with a shoebox in April costs more than turning up with a reconciled ledger, because someone is being paid by the hour to do the part you could have done as you went.

Using an agent is also the point at which “check with a registered tax or BAS agent” stops being a disclaimer and starts being a phone call you can actually make about your own contracts.

What the BAS actually asks for

Less than people expect. The ATO’s page on GST reporting methods sets out the GST information required on an activity statement as G1 total sales, 1A GST on sales, and 1B GST on purchases. In plain words: what you sold, the GST you collected on it, and the GST credits you are claiming on your business purchases. Businesses with a GST turnover of $10 million or more report on the full method, which adds labels such as G2 export sales and G10 capital purchases.

The BAS may also carry PAYG instalments, which the ATO describes as regular prepayments of the expected tax on your business and investment income. That amount is separate from GST, is usually pre-filled by the ATO, and is the reason a BAS bill can be larger than the GST you actually collected. It is not an extra tax, it is your income tax paid in advance.

The rest of the exercise is arithmetic on records you already have, which is exactly why the records are the whole job.

A two-hour prep routine

Done monthly, the following takes an hour or two and turns lodgment day into a data-entry task.

Reconcile sales. Every invoice issued in the period, matched to the money that arrived. The figure you report is driven by your accounting method, not by which invoices happen to be paid, so the point of the reconciliation is to find what is missing: the job you did in a rush and never invoiced, the invoice issued twice, the payment that cleared against nothing. Sequential invoice numbering makes gaps visible in seconds, which is one of the quiet reasons for keeping it tidy.

Reconcile purchases, with the tax invoice attached. A GST credit on anything over $82.50 including GST needs a valid tax invoice from the supplier, not a bank line saying BUNNINGS, and below that you still need a record of what the purchase was. Photograph receipts at the counter and attach them to the expense the same day. This is the single step that decides whether BAS week is calm, because it is the only one that cannot be reconstructed later from your bank statement alone.

Check the GST-free items. Not everything you sell or buy carries GST. The ATO’s when to charge GST (and when not to) page explains the split between taxable, GST-free and input-taxed sales, and it is the reference to check against your own product or service list. Coding these correctly as you go is far easier than auditing three months of transactions for the ones that were coded on autopilot.

Check private use. The phone, the car, the laptop, the part of the internet bill that is Netflix. Apportioning at the time, with a note on how you worked out the split, is a two-minute job that is nearly impossible to reconstruct honestly in April.

Put the GST aside. The GST you collect is not revenue. One of the suggestions on the ATO’s accounting for GST page is to put the GST you collect in a separate bank account. A business that spends its GST is borrowing at a rate it never agreed to.

The mechanics of registration, the $75,000 threshold and working GST back out of a price are in GST registration and BAS for sole traders, and the invoice side of the same records is in how to invoice as a sole trader.

Paying, and what to do if you cannot

The BAS is lodged and paid by the same date. Payment options and the payment reference number are on the ATO’s due dates page, and voluntary early payments against a future liability are allowed if you would rather clear the money as it comes in.

If the amount is more than you have, the thing that makes it worse is silence. The ATO’s guidance on finding it hard to lodge and pay on time is to make contact before the due date, and its payment plans page includes an online estimator that works out an upfront amount, a manageable repayment and an estimate of the interest. A general interest charge applies to any amount not paid by the due date, so a shorter plan costs less than a longer one.

Lodging on time is a separate obligation from paying, and there is a failure to lodge on time penalty that is avoided simply by lodging. That applies even in a quarter with nothing to report: the ATO’s how to lodge your BAS page says that even if you have nothing to report for the period, the BAS still has to be lodged as nil by the due date.

How Apsis helps

The reason BAS week hurts is missing records, so Apsis keeps them as they happen: every invoice numbered and dated as you issue it, every expense logged with its receipt uploaded against it, all attached to the client and job they belong to. Invoices, expenses with receipt upload, and timesheets with reports are on the free plan, which covers 5 clients and 20 invoices a month. On the paid plan, the tax module adds a GST and BAS view that shows GST collected and GST paid for a period on any day of the quarter, so the number is something you check rather than something you discover on the 27th.