Sole trader setup for Australian businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — sole trader setup is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to ATO. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside company formation more broadly, that stays with your registered BAS or tax agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for sole trader setup — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Sole trader setup sits inside company formation, alongside Pty Ltd company registration, Australian subsidiary of an Indian company, Partnership setup. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

The ABN itself is free through the official Australian Business Register. The only government cost that applies is if you register a business name with ASIC ($47 for 1 year or $108 for 3 years), which is only required if you trade under a name other than your own.

Most applications through abr.gov.au issue an ABN instantly online. A smaller share get flagged for manual review — usually triggered by an unclear activity description or a details mismatch — which can take up to 28 days.

No. Your existing individual Tax File Number doubles as the sole trader's tax identifier — there is no separate business TFN to apply for.

GST registration becomes mandatory once your turnover reaches or is projected to reach $75,000 in any 12-month period, with a 21-day window from when you knew or should have known you'd cross it. Below that, registration is optional.

You're required to register within 21 days of knowing you'll exceed the threshold. Not registering on time can mean owing GST on sales made after the trigger date even without having collected it, plus potential penalties — which is why we track the turnover trigger rather than waiting for it to be discovered later.

Only if you're trading under a name other than your own legal name. If invoices, your website and your shopfront all use your own name, no separate business name registration is required. If you trade as anything else, it's a separate ASIC registration on top of the ABN.

No — that's a tax agent service under the Tax Agent Services Act 2009, and answering it for a fee requires Tax Practitioners Board registration, which we don't hold. We prepare the facts pack; your registered tax agent gives the advice.

There's no separate certificate — the ABN itself, verifiable on the public ABN Lookup register, is the registration. That's a deliberately lighter setup than jurisdictions where a proprietorship needs a distinct registration document on top of a tax ID.

We prepare and can lodge the ABN application, the business name registration if needed, and the GST/PAYG-withholding registrations once triggered. Anything that involves judging a tax treatment or giving structuring advice sits with your registered tax agent, not with us.

Yes, effectively — without an ABN, businesses paying you are required to withhold 47% under no-ABN withholding rules. Getting the ABN in place before the first invoice avoids that withholding entirely.

Taking on your first employee is one of the triggers that brings PAYG withholding registration into play alongside GST — we queue that registration once a hire is confirmed rather than leaving it until the first pay run is due.