Posted by Mark Troselj, VP and Managing Director for Asia Pacific and Japan

Tax reporting is never anyone’s idea of a good time, but that accounting requirement just got a little easier for businesses in Australia thanks to a new partnership between NetSuite and GovReports, a leading provider of government reporting lodgement solutions in Australia. Businesses registered with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) will soon be able to report important tax information to the ATO directly from NetSuite using single sign-on.

As the ATO moves to replace its ageing portal technology, the Australian Government will be decommissioning its Electronic Lodgement Service (ELS) in June 2016 and is currently replacing it with a Standard Business Reporting (SBR) approach to online or digital record-keeping to simplify business reporting obligations. GovReports is Australia’s leading Standard Business Reporting (SBR) product and service provider, lodging between 5,000 and 12,000 Business Activity Statement (BAS) submissions to the ATO every month on behalf of Australian businesses and accounting professionals.

GovReports has built a SuiteApp on NetSuite’s SuiteCloud Development Network that automatically aggregates the sales, expense and Goods and Services Tax (GST) required for tax reporting purposes from within our leading business management software, prefills this data into the relevant Business Activity Statement (BAS) report and securely transmits the reports directly to the ATO at the appropriate reporting times, using the highest levels of encryption. This saves businesses from having to switch over to the tax department portal for lodgement. It also offers a queuing facility for peak demand times or, in case of an ATO system outage, enables reports to be lodged automatically once the system is available again.

This is exactly the type of complementary software we provide to our customers due to our strong ecosystem of partners.

The GovReports SuiteApp also enables our customers to add additional users to enable them to work collaboratively on taxation reporting to the ATO, enabling anyone with approved access rights to review and operate from NetSuite. This enables the allocation of roles and tasks to staff to ensure compliance requirements are met and that there is appropriate oversight on the work in progress, particularly beneficial for organisations where there may be multiple employees responsible for financial reporting.

The app also provides an audit trail within NetSuite, with a record of preparation and lodgement details allocated to specific users that can significantly reduce duplicate processes and double data entry, as well as simplify compliance.

There’s more in store as well. Later in the year, GovReports SuiteApp will be able to extract payroll data from the Infinet Cloud Payroll SuiteApp to complete IAS and BAS reporting and lodgement, providing all the functionality that companies registered with the ATO need to fulfil their payroll responsibilities – from time and leave management, through to tax and superannuation calculations, employee salaries and posting to NetSuite.