Contractor payments 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 — contractor payments is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to ATO. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside payroll operations 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 contractor payments — 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.

Contractor payments sits inside payroll operations, alongside Payroll processing, Single Touch Payroll support, Super guarantee processing. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

Unless they've provided a Statement by a Supplier covering the exemption, you're required to withhold PAYG from the payment at the top marginal rate. We flag a missing or invalid ABN at the point of the first invoice so the withholding decision is made before the payment clears, not discovered afterward.

Only if the contractor is registered for GST. An unregistered contractor's invoice shouldn't carry GST at all. We record each contractor's GST registration status and match the tax code on their invoices to it — whether a specific arrangement should attract GST in the first place is a question for your BAS agent.

Yes — this catches a lot of businesses off guard. The Superannuation Guarantee Act has its own, broader definition of 'employee' that can apply to someone paid principally for their labour, independent of how they're classified for income tax and PAYG. We flag payment patterns that fit that description for your accountant to assess; we don't make the call ourselves.

It's an annual report to the ATO listing what you paid contractors during the year, required for businesses in industries the ATO has specified — building and construction, cleaning, courier and road freight, IT, and security-related services among them — due by 28 August. If your industry is on the list, we tag contractor records accordingly through the year so the report comes from the ledger rather than a rebuild in August.

It's the ATO form an individual can complete when they're not required to have an ABN — for example, a one-off or non-business supply — which exempts the payment from no-ABN withholding without an ABN needing to exist. A contractor who should have an ABN but simply hasn't provided one is a different, unresolved situation. We keep the two clearly distinct on the record so a legitimate exemption is never mistaken for a missing ABN, or the reverse.

No. Applying the correct GST tax code to a contractor invoice as it's entered is a bookkeeping task; deciding whether GST properly applies to a given arrangement is a BAS service under TASA 2009 and sits with your registered BAS or tax agent. We record and code — they determine.

Every payment is logged against the contractor's record as it's paid, tagged with the ABN status, GST coding, and TPAR-industry flag where relevant, and reconciled against the bank feed on a set cadence rather than reconstructed at year-end.

Generally an ABN applies to entities carrying on a business in Australia, so a genuinely overseas contractor performing work outside Australia is often outside standard ABN and no-ABN withholding rules — but the correct treatment depends on the specific arrangement. We tag overseas-contractor records separately at onboarding so they're routed to your accountant rather than run through domestic ABN checks by default.

The ABN Lookup record is the source of truth, not the invoice letterhead. We verify the legal entity name against the ABN register at onboarding and flag a mismatch before the first payment, rather than assuming an invoice header is accurate.

No — lodgment sits with your registered BAS or tax agent. What we hand off ahead of 28 August is a reconciled, industry-tagged contractor ledger with ABN status already resolved, so lodging is a formality rather than a data-collection exercise.