My name is Joanne Smith B.A; and I’m a sole trader in Perth, Western Australia, and I run my own web design and online marketing companyd Yazoogle working with local business since 2003 and I’ve been building websites and digital solutions for small businesses for many years, helping them grow online.
Like many small business owners, as Yazoogle grew I reached a point where I had to register for GST and start lodging Business Activity Statements (BAS). I had read the basics, but when the first pink BAS form arrived from the ATO, I sat at my desk and literally cried with frustration. I had no idea what to do or how to do it — but I knew it had to be done.
I remember staring at codes like G1, G11, 1A, and PAYG and wondering how to turn all those numbers into the totals the ATO required. I had no accounting background, no bookkeeper on standby, and the official ATO guides didn’t make it any clearer.
I spoke to my twin brother in frustration, after an hour trying to work out the meaning of the codes G1 and G11 and how to get to those figures, as he is my go to help for anything accounts! He advised me with a stern voice, you cannot afford to pay an accountant to do this for you, so your going to have to buckle down and learn how to do it yourself, as he knew personally other small businesses that were spending from $400 to $600 a quarter to lodge their BAS.
I had a quick look online and to be honest, in 2022, there was not much information except at the ATO. main website. After figuring out what the codes were, I picked up my calculator -- opened my bank statements that had come in the post and started to highlight with yellow highlighter my income ( now with GST ) and pink highlighter my Expenses with GST and started to add them up on my calculator, great everything was going well and then it happened, I hit 2 number buttons at the same time and I had a sinking feeling, I knew I had to start all over again. With a sigh, rolled my eyes, opened page one of the bank statement and started to key in the sums...and then it happened again on page 5, I hit the multiply tab instead of the Add tab and suddenly I had earned $546,7545.00. income which was wrong!
I could not believe my eyes, how could I do it again ? I looked at the clock on the wall, how could 40mins go back so fast ? Am I still in the real world ? I sat up, back stiff, fingers stiff, eyes swimming in front of my head and little stabs of pain from squinting at those figures. And because I am a Aries, we do tend to find better ways of doing things.
This was how the idea of building my own in-house Microsoft excel sheet for calculating all those totals came to be, with the words of my Twin, you cannot afford to get an accountant to do it for you, I did not give up and opened my excel and created the columns and added formulas to do all the calculations for me.
I then opened my bank account and with a split screen set up on my computer screen, I simple coped and pasted the data from the bank account into the correct columns on the excel sheet as I knew that they formulas would correctly add up the sums and I did not fear double hitting a key on the desk calculator and having to start all over again.
So tears turned to smiles, as I knew then and there that the figures I would submit to the ATO at MYGOV portal would be absolutely correct.
Four years later and after using my excel sheet in-house with multiple BAS lodgements that were true and correct for 16 quarters, and having a 26 year background in web design and online marketing and product design, I decided to turn this into a digital product called BASCalc ((( short for BAS Calculator ) to sell online as I know in my heart that it will help other small businesses like me, who need desperate help with calculating their BAS for lodging with the ATO without having to pay an accountant to do it saving possible expensive fees that could be used elsewhere in the business or just life.
