September 2022

“We’re excited to offer this free live training course to help those new to a company secretary role find their feet in a complex and ever-changing compliance landscape,” said Ron Lesh, BGL’s Managing Director. “BGL has over 30 years of experience in the corporate compliance space and has developed this course to share its knowledge and expertise with the community and help pave the way for the next generation of company secretaries and administrators”.

Warren Renden, Head of CAS 360 at BGL, said: “We developed CAS 360 to be the complete tool for managing company compliance requirements. This new training course will give participants an overview of company secretary duties, so they may better grasp their roles and responsibilities.”

BGL’s Company Secretary 101: A Beginner’s Guide live online training course is ideal for new ASIC registered agents, accountants and administrators or those wanting to refresh their skills and will provide attendees with an understanding of the core duties, legal responsibilities, tasks and activities of a company secretary. The course is complimentary for all and provides attendees with 2 CPD hours.

A company secretary has an essential role in governing and monitoring how a company operates to ensure the company is compliant with Australian corporate law. It involves maintaining a registered office and reporting any changes for the company to ASIC. Because of this critical role, a company secretary is subject to several legal obligations and duties.

To learn more about BGL’s Company Secretary 101: A Beginner’s Guide live online training course or to register, visit www.bglcorp.com/company-secretary-course.

An ATO Crypto Tax update, a BGL – XPM update, and one small change that can save your client from ASIC fines.

Crypto Accountants felt the adrenaline pumping through them on Monday morning as the ATO provided further guidance on airdrops and how these should be handled from a tax perspective.

Airdrops are used as a way for adoption of a token to increase through a group of users by providing them with ‘free’ tokens. Think of it as a form of marketing. If the token is part of an existing project then the recipient needs to consider the token as income and declare it using the market value at that time.

The change now is that for brand new tokens, or “initial allocations”, these airdrops do not need to be considered as income at the time they are received and are to be recorded with a zero dollar cost base. The rationalisation being that since it is an initial allocation, there is no ‘market value’ that can be attributed.

I’m not an accountant and don’t pretend to play one on the internet, so make sure you speak to your local professional before making any crazy tax decisions!

Another three week cycle, another release for the combined Simple Fund 360 / Simple Invest 360 teams with the headline item being the new integration feature.

The new “Practice Management Version 2.0” gives you a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to connecting integration between Simple Fund 360, Simple Invest 360, CAS360 and your chosen Practice Management solution. Hate duplicates? So do we! You can now choose if you want to sync your data one-way, two-way or for the control freaks detail oriented: manual sync.

Probably no surprise that this hint relates to integration: Turn on your Simple Fund 360 integration with CAS 360 to sync any changes made to corporate trustees. This will generate a notification for you in CAS 360 to then prepare the associated ASIC form – never be caught off guard ever again and help your client to avoid ASIC fines!

Here are three things that I hope you find of value: One Industry news, One BGL news, and One tool to help your firm.

Jim Chalmers announced that the government would be looking to implement the 120% tax deduction for small businesses that invest in training and digital uptake. Furthermore, they are looking to backdate this to the 29th of March.

This means that as long as your firm has an annual turnover of less than $50 million and invests in digital technology by 30 June 2023 the tax deduction can be claimed. A good accountant will tell you that it never makes sense to spend just for the sake of receiving a deduction. But as the old saying goes, you need to spend money to make money, right?

At BGL it was business as usual, as we won the SMSF Adviser 2022 award for Best SMSF Software Provider. This award is especially coveted by the SMSF software space as it relies on accounting firms actually casting their votes rather than the advertising spend allocated to whoever is running the award. 

If you need a high impact on efficiency with a low cost of implementation, look no further than BGL’s Share Data Pack – which is available as an “add-on” for BGL’s Simple Fund 360 and Simple Invest 360 Professional Edition software subscriptions at just $40 plus GST per fund/entity, per annum (Learn More). The Share Data Pack will:

1. Confirm balances back to major registries on a quarterly basis.
2. Automatically import contract notes from the broker
3. Update investment balances

For anyone that has spent time logging into the share registry by each single investment, inputting HIN and postcode to check that unit balances are correct, they will know that having all that information available on-screen and up to date is a lifesaver.

Furthermore, recent updates mean that now the investment balances are updated within minutes of an order being executed by the broker. Did somebody say real-time data?

For a detailed explanation of BGL’s Share Data Pack, watch our webinar recording at https://youtu.be/G15CRnDt1gY.

Otherwise, simply click watch our quick video below!