Work backwards from June 30, not forwards from today
Most founders treat June 30 as a wall they hit, then spend July digging out from under it. The founders whose July is quiet treat it as a target they walk toward — starting in May, when there is still time to fix a mis-coded account or chase a missing invoice without anyone feeling rushed.
The mechanics are the same either way: bank feeds reconciled, debtors and creditors matched, payroll and superannuation checked against the general ledger, fixed asset and depreciation schedules current. What changes is when the errors surface. Found in May, an error is a two-line journal entry. Found in the first week of July, with a registered agent waiting on final figures, it is a fire drill.
What actually gets reconciled in May
May is not close month — it is the last full month before close month, and that makes it the right time for the checks that take longer than a quick tick-and-flick. Bank and credit card feeds for July through April should already be reconciled by now if the books have been kept live through the year; May is when you confirm that trend, not when you discover it was never true.
The higher-value May work is the stuff that is easy to defer: ageing debtor and creditor reports reviewed line by line rather than skimmed, inventory counts scheduled if the business carries stock, loan and lease balances confirmed against the lender statement rather than the opening balance carried forward from last year, and a first pass at any accrual or prepayment that spans the year-end.
Superannuation guarantee is worth a specific mention here, because the mechanics changed on 1 July 2026. Under Payday Super, SG now has to reach the employee’s fund within 7 business days of each payday rather than by a quarterly due date — so there is no April–June quarter payment left to chase in May. What May checks instead is that every payday’s SG has actually cleared into the fund on time all year, since a string of small misses only becomes visible when someone adds them up.
- Bank and card feeds reconciled through April, trend confirmed
- Debtor and creditor ageing reviewed line by line
- Stock count scheduled where the business carries inventory
- Loan and lease balances confirmed, and per-payday SG clearance checked against fund receipts
STP finalisation: the July deadline that starts in June
Single Touch Payroll finalisation is the declaration that flips an employee’s income statement in myGov from "not tax ready" to "tax ready," and for most employers it is due by 14 July following year-end. Employers with closely held payees — a family member of a family business, a director of a closely held company, a beneficiary of a trust — get until 30 September for that group.
The number itself is not the hard part; getting to a number worth declaring is. Finalisation only takes minutes in STP-enabled payroll software once gross pay, tax withheld, and superannuation guarantee accruals for every pay run already match the general ledger. If that reconciliation has been running each pay cycle rather than saved for year-end, the two weeks after June 30 are spent reviewing a short list of exceptions instead of auditing twelve months of payroll against the ledger for the first time.
A finalisation declaration lodged and later found to be wrong can be corrected — amended STP information can be resubmitted for up to five years after the relevant financial year — but a correction after an employee has already lodged their own return based on the earlier figures is a worse conversation than catching it before 14 July. Superannuation guarantee liability calculations and the underlying figures are a matter for the business’s registered BAS or tax agent to confirm; a clean, reconciled payroll ledger is what makes that confirmation quick rather than an investigation.
TPAR, where it applies, is an annual report built from twelve months of records
Businesses in building and construction, cleaning, courier, road freight, IT, and security or investigation services that pay contractors generally need to lodge a Taxable Payments Annual Report, due 28 August. A business where the relevant service is only part of a broader offering still needs to lodge if payments for that service reach 10% or more of business income.
Because TPAR only asks for what was already paid to contractors during the year — name, ABN, gross amount, GST — the report is either a five-minute export from software that has tracked contractor payments correctly all year, or a month of chasing down ABNs and invoice totals contractor by contractor. Getting contractor details right at the point of onboarding, and coding contractor payments to a distinct account rather than lumping them into general subcontractor expense, is what determines which of those two Augusts a business has.
Why the agent’s July is easier when June was live
A registered BAS or tax agent or a business’s tax adviser works from what the books say, not from what happened. If June’s transactions are coded and reconciled by the time July starts, the agent’s first pass is a review, not a reconstruction — they can move straight to the judgment calls that are genuinely theirs to make, rather than spending billable hours chasing down what a bank transaction was for.
This is the practical case for keeping the books current through the year rather than catching up quarterly or annually: not that a monthly close is inherently more correct, but that it moves the effort of finding errors to the month they happened in, when the context is still fresh, instead of stacking every month’s unresolved questions into a single June scramble.
The six-week checklist
None of this needs a big-bang project. Spread across May and June, it is a short, repeatable list — the kind that gets easier each year it is run, because fewer surprises turn up each time.
- Reconcile all bank and card feeds through the prior month
- Review debtor and creditor ageing line by line rather than skimming the total
- Confirm loan and lease balances against source documents, and check every payday’s SG cleared the fund within 7 business days
- Reconcile payroll gross pay, tax withheld, and SG accruals against the ledger for every pay run to date
- Check contractor payment coding and ABN details for anyone in a TPAR-reportable industry
- Flag any accrual, prepayment, or asset addition that spans the year-end for the agent’s review
- Confirm the STP finalisation date on the calendar — 14 July for arm’s length employees, 30 September for closely held payees
Reading about it is optional. The books aren’t.
A named accountant, software underneath, licensed partners where the law wants them.