Do I Need an Accountant for My Company in Australia?

No law in Australia requires your company to have an accountant. You can prepare and lodge the company tax return yourself, and some directors do.

What stops most of them is the route rather than the rules. A company cannot lodge through myGov or myTax. The ATO’s position is that you must use SBR-enabled software to lodge online and that you are not able to lodge directly in Online services for business, so doing it yourself means buying software or filing on paper. The return is due 28 February for a small company lodging its own, and 31 October if any prior-year return is outstanding, so being behind pulls the deadline forward rather than pushing it back.

This guide covers both sets of obligations, what self-lodging actually involves, where an accountant earns the fee, and when the honest answer is that you do not need one.

Do you legally need an accountant for your company?

No. Neither the Corporations Act nor the tax law says a company must engage one. A director can prepare the accounts, complete the company tax return and lodge it.

The law restricts the other side of the transaction. Only a registered tax agent can charge a fee for preparing and lodging a return, which makes the choice binary: either you do it, or a registered agent does. Someone who is not registered cannot be paid to lodge it for you, whatever the arrangement is called, and that includes a bookkeeper who does not hold tax agent registration. The Tax Practitioners Board keeps a public register of every registered agent in the country and it is free to search, so checking takes about a minute.

Registration is not just a credential, either. It carries a protection that does not exist if you lodge the return yourself. Under the safe harbour provisions the ATO administers, a taxpayer is not liable for certain penalties where a registered agent was responsible for the failure, including failing to lodge a document such as an income tax return on time. You have to show you gave the agent everything needed to lodge by the due date, and that their failure was not reckless or a deliberate disregard of the law. Do it yourself and there is nobody else the penalty can attach to.

The more useful question is what the job actually is once nobody else is doing it, and it is worth answering in advance rather than in the week the return is due. If you are not certain a company was the right structure to begin with, the tax differences between structures decide that question before this one is worth asking.

The two sets of obligations a company carries

Company compliance runs on two streams. The ATO wants returns and payments. ASIC wants the company kept in good standing on the register. They have separate obligations, separate deadlines and separate fees.

The ATO stream

A company tax return every year, reporting its taxable income, tax offsets, credits, PAYG instalments and the tax it is liable to pay or that is refundable. There is no threshold below which it stops applying. The ATO’s rule is that you lodge if you carried on a business, even if the business earnt no income.

The company’s income is separate from yours. That separation is the point of the structure, and it means two returns rather than one.

PAYG instalments start once the ATO puts the company onto them, and a business activity statement falls due each quarter if the company is registered for GST, with its own dates and its own arithmetic. Records run for five years, counted from when you made the record or completed the transaction, whichever is later.

Lodging late has a price attached. The failure to lodge penalty runs at one penalty unit for every 28 days the return is overdue, or part of 28 days, capped at five units. A penalty unit is $364 for infringements on or after 1 July 2026, so the ceiling is $1,820 per document. The ATO says it warns by phone or in writing before applying it, and that it generally does not apply penalties in isolated cases of late lodgement, but a company that is a year or two behind is not an isolated case.

The ASIC stream

ASIC names five obligations that sit on company officeholders, which for a small company means the director: paying ASIC fees, checking and responding to the annual company review statement, telling ASIC about changes to the company, passing an annual solvency resolution, and deregistering the company when it closes. A proprietary company does not have to appoint a secretary, and where there is none, the directors carry the secretary’s duties as well.

The annual review fee is $342 for a proprietary company from 1 July 2026, or $70 for a special purpose company. A late payment fee applies if it is not paid within two months of the review date.

Records are where the two streams disagree, and ASIC wins. The ATO’s own record-keeping page notes that ASIC requires companies to keep records for seven years, so seven is the number that binds a company even though five is the figure most tax articles quote.

The two streams have to be closed in the right order at the end, as well. A company must lodge its final tax return before ASIC deregisters it, and once the company has been deregistered a return can no longer be lodged and the ATO cannot process one. Getting that sequence backwards means applying to reinstate the company with ASIC before anything can be fixed.

Underneath all of it sit the director duties: acting in good faith, understanding the company’s financial position, keeping proper records, and preventing insolvent trading. ASIC is explicit that penalties can apply even where the director did not intend to do the wrong thing.

Can you lodge a company tax return yourself?

Yes, and the obstacle is practical rather than legal.

A company has three lodgement routes: SBR-enabled software, a registered tax agent, or paper. The ATO’s wording on the online option leaves no room in it. You must use SBR-enabled software to lodge online, and you are not able to lodge directly in Online services for business. myTax is an individual channel, so it is not an option for a company at any turnover.

Compare that with a sole trader, on the same ATO page. A sole trader lodges through myTax for nothing, with income prefilled, and the ATO works out the tax owing and issues an assessment. A company gets none of those three things.

The date row is the one that catches people out. Falling behind moves a company’s deadline earlier, from 28 February to 31 October, which is the opposite of how an extension normally works.

Nothing comes back to tell you it was right

The ATO does not automatically issue a notice of assessment for a company return, because the return is deemed to be the notice of the assessment.

With a personal return, you lodge and the ATO sends back an assessment: your figures, their arithmetic, the refund or the bill. With a company return, you work out the tax yourself and nothing comes back to confirm it. An error does not surface at lodgement. It sits in the file until the ATO looks at it, which may be years later, with interest running from the original due date.

The director also still lodges their own individual tax return, covering wages, directors’ fees or dividends drawn out of the company.

Where an accountant earns the fee on a company

Accuracy and saved time are not company-specific, and they are not the reason. Four things are, and they are where owner-managed companies come unstuck.

Division 7A is the biggest of them. A payment or benefit from a private company to a shareholder or an associate can be treated as a dividend, and a Division 7A deemed dividend is generally unfranked, meaning it is taxed in your hands with no credit for the tax the company already paid. It catches directors who draw money out through the year and sort out the paperwork later, because by then the loan either meets the Division 7A rules or it does not.

The 25% rate is not automatic. A base rate entity pays 25% and everything else pays 30%. Both conditions have to be met in the income year itself: aggregated turnover under $50 million, and no more than 80% of assessable income being base rate entity passive income. Prior-year turnover does not come into it. Getting the test wrong is a five percentage point error applied to the whole taxable income.

On a company with $200,000 of taxable income, that is $50,000 of tax at the base rate against $60,000 at the full rate. The passive income limb is what usually decides it, and it is not always obvious: interest, rent, royalties, net capital gains and franked distributions all count as passive, and so does a trust distribution to the extent the trust’s own income was passive. A company holding an investment property alongside its trading activity can slip over the 80% line in a quiet trading year without anything visibly changing.

The franking account records the tax the company has paid and determines what it can distribute as franked dividends. Credits arise on tax paid, debits on franked distributions, and the balance carries across years. A deficit, where the debits exceed the credits, triggers franking deficit tax, so a franked dividend the account cannot support creates a liability rather than just an error.

Reconciliation matters once the company is registered for GST, because the figures in the return have to agree with the BAS lodged through the year. A BAS done loosely in October becomes a return problem in February.

When you genuinely do not need one

Sometimes the answer is no.

A company that is not trading is the clearest case. The obligations still exist, but they are thin and repetitive, and a dormant company’s requirements are a short list once you know them.

Beyond that, self-lodging holds up when all of these are true:

• One income stream, and no employees
• Nothing moving between you and the company beyond wages already run through payroll
• No GST registration, or a BAS you already handle confidently
• Records that are current rather than a shoebox in March
• SBR-enabled software you already pay for

It stops holding the moment money moves between you and the company outside payroll, a second entity appears, you take on staff, or a year goes unlodged. Any one of those turns a form-filling exercise into a judgement call.

Worth being honest about the arithmetic too. If you would be buying SBR software purely to lodge one simple company return, the software cost eats a good part of what you save.

What we charge, and what the fee buys

Our own fixed fees, all including GST: $440 for a simple company tax return where the company is not registered for GST and has no employees, $330 for a dormant or low-activity company, and $660 for the standard tier where there are BAS obligations or up to two PAYG employees. Anything more complicated is quoted as a fixed fee before work starts.

The fee itself is deductible. The cost of managing your tax affairs, including lodging through a registered agent, is claimable, and you generally claim it in the year you pay it.

For what the wider market charges and why the range is so wide, the company return cost breakdown covers it properly.

The case for paying someone is not really about time. It is that Division 7A, the base rate entity test and the franking account are three places where a single wrong call costs more than several years of fees, and none of them announce themselves while you are filling in the form.