Accountants: Your Financial Life Partner

Accountants are an essential part of the financial world, yet their importance is often overlooked. They provide vital knowledge and insights to individuals and businesses alike, helping them to effectively manage their finances. Accountants possess a wide range of skills; they can help with taxes, payrolls, financial planning and budgeting, as well as giving advice on investments and loans.

Benefits of Working with an Accountant

Managing finances can be a daunting task for any business owner, especially those who are just starting out. However, one of the most important investments that any business can make is to hire an accountant. Working with a professional accountant can provide many benefits to businesses of all sizes and industries.

Accountants have the expertise and knowledge necessary to ensure your finances remain organized and up-to-date. This means they can help you manage budgets, track expenses, identify potential deductions or credits, as well as prepare accurate financial statements and tax returns. Additionally, accountants are trained in identifying areas where there may be room for significant savings or improvements in performance by analyzing current financial data. Furthermore, they are able to provide valuable advice when making financial decisions such as setting goals and developing strategies for achieving them.

Services Accountants Offer

Accountants provide a wide range of services for businesses of all sizes. From helping small companies get their finances in order to providing complex financial advice to large corporations, accountants are essential for any business that wants to succeed financially. Here is an overview of the different types of services accountants can offer:

Bookkeeping & Record-Keeping: At its core, accounting is about managing and tracking financial records. Accountants create detailed reports and documents that help businesses accurately track their income, expenses, and investments. They also help ensure accuracy by looking at historical records and comparing them with current ones. Additionally, they can help with things such as budgeting and forecasting future expenses.

Tax Preparation Services: Tax preparation is one of the most important duties carried out by accountants.

Communicating with an Accountant

Having clear communication between yourself and your accountant is key to ensuring that your finances are managed properly. Good communication with your accountant begins before you even engage them in their services. When looking for an accountant, make sure they’re someone you feel comfortable communicating with and have a good understanding of your needs as a business or individual. Once they’ve been hired, establishing expectations on both sides is essential for maintaining ongoing dialogue throughout the year – this includes setting up regular meetings or calls to go over any changes or updates.

In conclusion, accountants provide invaluable services to their clients. They can offer advice on how to manage your finances and what investments are right for you. They can also help you with taxes, ensuring that the information you submit is accurate and up-to-date. Accountants provide a wealth of knowledge and expertise that can be used to help people reach their financial goals. Get it touch with us today by clicking HERE or calling 02 8764 1596

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Impact Taxation and Financial Services Pty. Ltd. is a CPA Practice based in the Bankstown area. We are committed to customizing our services to meet your financial needs and help you achieve your visions and goals.

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10 things you should consider before buying a property

Are you considering buying a property? Do you know you could miss opportunities to save thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars if you don’t plan well before the purchase?

Below are a few key considerations:

1. How should you set up your loan structure? If you don’t have a loan offset account for a rental property, after you make extra payments directly to the loan account, you can only claim interest deduction on the remaining balance of the loan. For tax purposes, this deductible balance can’t be changed even if you redraw the overpaid amount later. A good loan structure could also help you to stabilize interest rate and speed up loan repayment by combining a standard variable loan (with an offset account) and a fix rates account.

2. Timing of renovation. You might want to do a renovation right after you have bought the rental property. But do you know for any genuine repair & maintenance included in the renovation, you can claim an outright deduction against the rental income when the property is available for rental? If the work is done before the date when the property is available for rental, you can only claim the deduction against future capital gain when the property is sold. Depend on when you are going to sell, it could take years or up to decades before you can claim the deduction.

3. How should you split ownership? You might want to share the property ownership with a family member. For tax purposes, the percentage of ownership is based on the legal title, regardless of who is paying more on the mortgage. If the property will give you a tax profit, you might want to allocate more
ownership to the low-income earner to utilize the lower marginal tax rate. If it is giving you a tax loss, you might want to allocate more ownership to the high-income earner to utilize the loss. The goal is for the family to pay minimum tax together.

4. Should you use a family trust to purchase the property? There are many pros and cons related to a family trust. The advantages include tax savings on rental profit or capital gain, asset protection and succession planning on family wealth. However, family trust can’t distribute losses. All losses are trapped in the trust to be used to offset future trust profit. Therefore, you can’t utilize any rental loss in a trust to offset other income such as salary & wages. Family trusts also attract high accounting fees on initial setup and annual fees on financial statements and tax returns. State governments also charge much higher land tax on family trusts.

5. Will the income level change in future years for different owners? You might want to forecast the possible income for different owners to understand total tax payment / savings related to the property. This could also impact on your decision making on point 3 and 4 above.

6. Understand when you can treat your property as main residence to receive an exemption on capital gains tax. When eligible, even if you have received rental income, you could still treat your rental property as main residence and receive the exemption. To be eligible, you will need to treat it as your main residence at the beginning. Please check out this ATO link: Treating former home as main residence.

7. Decide whether you need to purchase a depreciation report. Most taxpayers don’t know that the depreciation on the building will need to be added back to calculate capital gains tax when the property is sold. When the property is held for more than 12 months, after applying the capital gains tax discount of 50%, it will effectively cut the tax rate by half at the time of sales. This makes depreciation deductions desirable for high income earners. However, for low-income earners it might not be ideal to claim depreciation as a rental deduction since they could be paying more on capital gains tax in the future. It could get more complicated if the property is under joint ownership between high and low income earners.

8. You might want to consider Centrelink payments for future or existing owners. Most Centrelink payments are income and asset tested. Before attaching a rental property to a family member who is receiving, or plan to receive government benefits, you might want to check the testing thresholds first to see if the Centrelink payment will be impacted. This is also applicable when you are making distributions from a family trust to different family members.

9. Have you considered using your SMSF (selfmanaged super fund) to make the purchase of a rental property? There are a lot of tax saving opportunities with a SMSF since the income tax rate is only 15%. And the capital gains tax rate is effectively only 10% after factoring in the 1/3 discount. The major downside with a SMSF is normally you can’t get the money out until you retire or on compassionate grounds (SMSF does have more flexibilities compared to normal retail super fund. But the choices are still very limited). It could be expensive to set up and operate a SMSF too. There are also strict legal requirements on the trustees. Penalties on incompliance could be severe. Tax law around SMSF is very complicated too. You will need to find a good tax accountant specialized in SMSF to help you to understand the structure, also do a cost-benefit analysis before setting it up.

10. Consider internal ownership changes. For your existing rental properties, you can also consider whether you should transfer the ownership between family members, or between different business structures (this is not applicable for SMSF). You might want to do this when the income level changes with family members, or rental property changes between tax profit and loss. Before the change, you need to consider the cost of transfer including capital gains tax, stamp duty, conveyancer fees, etc. Again, a cost-benefit analysis is a must before the change.

Last but not the least, did you combine all the above strategies and compare your choices? If you haven’t yet, how would you know that you have picked the best strategy to minimize your taxes? We can help you to factor in all considerations, compare different scenarios, also present you with a Property Prepurchase Report with all our findings to help you to make a decision. Contact us today to book in a consultation with an experienced tax accountant!

IMPORTANT INFORMATION
This is general advice only and does not consider your financial circumstances, needs and objectives. Before making any decision based on this document, you should assess your own circumstances or seek advice from your financial adviser and seek tax advice from your accountant.