Through the year
Bookkeeping for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporations
We handle the day-to-day bookkeeping, payroll and grant tracking through the year, so your corporation’s accounts are already in order when reporting season arrives.
Year-end pain is usually a bookkeeping problem
Corporations that scramble in December almost never have a reporting problem. They have an untracked year. The reports themselves are not the hard part. Working out what happened twelve months ago is.
The aim is to keep the record straight while the year is still happening, so the reporting at the end of it is a formality.
What we do
- Transactions and bank reconciliation — kept current, not caught up in batches.
- Payroll — staff, superannuation, and the reporting that goes with it.
- Grant income tracked against its conditions — which grant, what it was for, what has been spent, what is left.
- BAS and ATO obligations — prepared and lodged as a registered tax agent.
- Board-ready numbers during the year — so directors are not seeing the position for the first time at year end.
Grant money is the hard part
Bookkeeping for a corporation differs from bookkeeping for an ordinary business here, and it is where auditors most often raise issues.
Grant funding arrives on the funder’s calendar, not your corporation’s. It usually comes with conditions about what it can be spent on and by when. Money received but not yet spent generally is not income yet. If it is recorded as though it were, the corporation’s reported result can be wrong in a way an auditor will pick up and a funder may query.
Getting that right is an everyday habit: every grant tracked separately, against its own agreement, from the day the money lands. Do that and the grant acquittal is a report you can run.
Working with your software
We work with what your corporation already uses. If you are choosing a system for the first time, or the current one is not coping, we will say so. Changing systems mid-catch-up usually makes things harder.
We work in Xero and MYOB. Both are common in this sector, both handle grant tracking properly once they are set up for it, and either is fine. What matters is whether your chart of accounts is built so each funding source can be reported on separately. That is a setup question.
If your corporation uses something else, say so before you rule us out. Plenty of bookkeeping is software-agnostic, and we will tell you straight whether we can work in your system.
Art centres
Art centres are the hardest bookkeeping in the sector: artist payments, consignment stock and grant funding running at once, on top of an artwork system that has to reconcile to the ledger. See bookkeeping for art centres.
How to start
Tell us where the corporation is up to, and what records exist. We will tell you what it would take to get the books in order and keep them there. If your reports are already overdue, start at ORIC reporting instead; the bookkeeping can follow once we know what is outstanding.
Frequently asked questions
Can you do the bookkeeping and the annual reports?
Yes, and that is usually the point. When the same team keeps the books through the year and prepares the reports at year end, nothing has to be reconstructed from memory in December. What we cannot then do is audit those same accounts — independence requires a different firm for that, and we work alongside whoever you appoint.
Our records are a mess and we are behind. Will you still take us on?
Yes. Catching up is normal work, not a special case. We would start by finding out what records actually exist — bank statements, grant agreements, whatever is there — and reconstruct from those. It is almost always less bad than boards expect.
Do we have to change accounting software?
No. We work in Xero and MYOB, and we work with what your corporation already uses. Changing systems in the middle of a reporting catch-up usually makes things harder, so we would only suggest it once you are up to date and it is genuinely worth doing. If you use something else, tell us before ruling us out — a lot of bookkeeping is software-agnostic.
Can you do this if we are in a remote community?
Yes. Most of this work is done remotely — cloud accounting, documents sent through, video meetings when they are needed. We work with corporations across Australia and distance is not the constraint people expect it to be.