Open any small-business accounting ad in Australia and you'll meet the same bloke. High-vis, ute, clipboard. He's a tradie, and apparently he's the only person in the country working for himself.
He isn't. Around one in six working Australians is their own boss, and the range is enormous — the cleaner with four commercial contracts, the IT contractor invoicing one client for six months, the mobile physio driving between appointments, the copywriter billing by the hour, the two-person startup doing real work while the company structure is still a to-do item.
Different work, identical admin. You send invoices, you buy things, you set money aside for tax, and you keep enough records that if the ATO ever asks, you can answer.
The four things you have to stay on top of
1. Getting invoices out — and chased
A tax invoice needs your business name, your ABN, the date, a description of the work, the amount, and — if you're registered for GST — the GST amount or a statement that the total includes GST. It doesn't need to be pretty. It needs to exist and go out the same week the work finished.
The number worth knowing isn't how many invoices you've sent. It's how much is outstanding right now, and how much of that is overdue.
2. Capturing expenses when they happen
Every receipt you don't capture is a deduction you don't claim — money you've already spent, taxed as though you kept it. The failure mode is universal: the receipt goes in the glovebox, and by July it's a faded thermal-paper rectangle. Photograph it at the counter.
3. GST, if you're over the line
You must register for GST once your turnover hits $75,000 or more — gross income from all your businesses, minus GST. For non-profits it's $150,000. Drive taxi or rideshare and you must register regardless of turnover, from your first fare.
Below the threshold it's optional. Some register voluntarily to claim GST back on purchases, which also means lodging a BAS — worth a conversation with an accountant rather than a guess.
4. Keeping records for five years
The ATO requires most business records to be kept for five years, counted from when you prepared the record or completed the transaction it relates to, whichever is later. Records must be in English or easily convertible to it. Digital is explicitly fine, provided they can be extracted to a standard format like CSV.
Why the spreadsheet eventually breaks
- It's on the laptop, and you're not. You're at a job, in a van, at a client's kitchen table.
- Invoices live somewhere else. The spreadsheet tracks numbers; the invoice is a Word file or an email. Nothing reconciles.
- Nobody photographs a receipt into a spreadsheet. So deductions go unclaimed.
- One wrong formula and every number after it is wrong. Quietly. For months.
The usual next step is full accounting software — which for a lot of sole traders is the opposite problem. A chart of accounts, bank feeds and a monthly fee, to answer "who owes me money and what did I spend."
What's actually worth looking for
- It works where you work. On your phone, standing up, one-handed, without signal.
- Invoice and record in one place. If raising an invoice doesn't update what you're owed, you've bought two problems.
- Receipt capture with the camera. Anything you have to type in later, you won't.
- It exports. CSV your accountant can open — an ATO expectation and your insurance against lock-in.
- You know where your data lives. Your client list and your rates are commercially sensitive.
This is general information, not tax or financial advice. GST thresholds and record-keeping rules come from the ATO and can change — check the current position and talk to a registered tax agent about your own situation.
Sources: ATO — Registering for GST · ATO — Overview of record-keeping rules for business