Preparing a Business Activity Statement

These tasks are typically performed by someone with Accountant user permissions.

The preparation process is performed for the current company. The qualifying conditions for this process are:

  • Transactions line items of type "Tax" originating from sales invoices, sales credit notes, payable invoices, payable credit notes, and journals are retrieved.
  • If the Include Earlier Unreported Transactions checkbox is deselected, only those transactions dated within the qualifying period are included.
  • If the Include Earlier Unreported Transactions checkbox is selected, transactions dated earlier than the qualifying period are also included.
  • You cannot prepare a business activity statement when its period overlaps partially or totally with the period of another business activity statement associated with the same company.
  • You cannot prepare a business activity statement unless the status of the existing ones for the same company is "Reconciled".
Note:

If you select the Include Earlier Unreported Transactions checkbox for an existing business activity statement and you create a new record for the same company, its period cannot be earlier than the period of the existing business activity statement. Otherwise, you cannot create the new record.

Accrual Basis and Cash Basis

There are two different accounting methods available for the business activity statement. Depending on the one you select in the GST Accounting Method field, you can report different transactions:

  • If you select "Accrual Basis", the transactions associated with all your posted documents are included, regardless of whether the documents are paid.
  • If you select "Cash Basis", only the transactions associated with posted documents partially or fully paid are included.

If you select "Cash Basis", you must select the Include Earlier Unreported Transactions checkbox.

Note:

The Cash Basis accounting method is only available for the "Single Company" statement type.

Single Company Business Activity Statement

To prepare a business activity statement for a single company:

  1. Go to the Business Activity Statements tab.
  2. Open the record that you want to prepare the business activity statement for.
  3. Click Prepare Statement.

This initiates a process that completes the fields of the business activity statement record, changes its status to "Generated", and associates the transaction line items of type "Tax". You are notified by email of the success or failure of this operation.

Once the status of the business activity statement is "Generated", the transactions are linked to the record. If you want to perform the process again with the same criteria, you must prepare the business activity statement again.

After this process, the GST Return Report (BAS) and GST Return Report by Box (BAS) reports are generated. These reports enable you to view the transactions included in the calculation of each box. For more information, see GST Return Reports.

Group of Companies Business Activity Statement

Before preparing a business activity statement for a group of companies, you must be aware of the following:

  • You must set the Statement Type field as Group of Companies.
  • You must enter a tax group in the Tax Group field. For more information about tax groups, see Creating a Tax Group.

To prepare a business activity statement:

  1. Go to the Business Activity Statements tab.
  2. Open the record that you want to prepare the business activity statement for.
  3. Click Prepare Statement.

This initiates a process that completes the fields of the business activity statement record, changes its status to "Generated", and associates the transaction line items of type "Tax". You are notified by email of the success or failure of this operation.

Once the status of the business activity statement is "Generated", the transactions are linked to the record. If you want to perform the process again with the same criteria, you must prepare the business activity statement again.

After this process, the GST Return Report (BAS) and GST Return Report by Box (BAS) reports are generated. These reports enable you to view the transactions included in the calculation of each box. For more information, see GST Return Reports.

Manual Adjustments

When the status of a business activity statement is "Generated", you can make manual adjustments to the values populated during the preparation process using a journal. These modifications are retained when you prepare the business activity statement again.

You can also make manual adjustments directly on the business activity statement record but you must be aware of the following:

  • The adjustments are not linked to any transactions. Consequently, when you prepare a business activity statement again, the manual modifications are overwritten by the values populated during the preparation process.
  • You cannot edit formula fields as these fields are automatically updated according to the values manually entered in other fields.
  • The reports and documents do not reflect any manual modifications. As a result, there might be inconsistencies between the values manually entered and the reports and documents.