The PAYG Payment Summary (or your Group Certificate as it used to be known and is still often referred to…) is a statement provided to you by your employer for the financial year.

It includes a summary of information relating to your employment with that employer only, so if you worked for more than one employer, you will receive more than one PAYG Payment Summary.

The primary details on the PAYG Payment Summary include:

• your name
• your address
• your date of birth
• your gross income and allowances received
• any PAYG Withholding
• the period of employment
• the name and ABN of your employer
• the signature of the authorised person

It may also include details of lump sum payments as well as deductions such as union fees or workplace giving.

If you haven’t yet received your PAYG Payment Summary, you are well within your rights to make a request to your employer (by law they should have been provided by 14th July!), but if you are unable to get a response (sadly this does happen), simply get in touch and I can help you out!

Regards

This week saw me return to the Deakin University Warrnambool campus and it’s starting to feel like home again.

I attended Deakin University as a student all the way back in 1993 – 1995 where I obtained my Bachelor of Commerce. I had always intended to go to the Warrnambool Institute of Advanced Education, it just happened that WIAE had changed to Deakin by the time I got there!

In 1st trimester this year I was invited to lecture and present tutorials (actually I think they are called seminars these days), for the first year subject “Accounting for Decision Making”, and this trimester I am back for the second year subject “Management Accounting”.

You might be thinking that accounting is accounting – it deals with numbers and that is all, but actually there is more to accounting than you might be aware of.

Management accounting focuses on a businesses ability to effectively use the resources it has available. It is management accounting that provides both financial and non-financial information so that managers can plan, control and make decisions effectively.

So for the next three months you can call me Professor Bron!

Regards

You will be well aware that the 2017 tax season is underway.

Some of you may have even started or completed your 2017 tax return – if this is you, please remember that refunds won’t be issued  by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) until after 18th July.

But the advice I want to give you today is…start preparing for your 2018 tax return NOW!

That’s right, I want you to start thinking about your 2018 tax return so that every time you make a decision this financial year, you think about the documentation you need to keep.

I have always found it surprising how much documentation I have to support my deductions when I make a conscious effort to file it away – and sorting through a few papers is far less traumatic than racing around at the end of the year looking for paperwork I can’t even remember the details of!

I make a point of not accepting any ‘shoeboxes’ of documents anymore, but I do accept summaries of shoeboxes, after all the onus is on you to keep the records. And if a manual system is not for you, you may like to look at the ATO myDeductions tool.

Regards