Guides · General information
Plain-English Guides on Tax, Lending & SMSF
Short, practical explainers from a Chartered Accountant and Credit Representative based in Cherrybrook. These guides are general information only — they do not take your personal circumstances into account and are not personal tax, credit or financial advice. For advice on your situation, book a scoping call.
Tax & business
Tax and business guides.
Borrowing & lending
Borrowing and lending guides.
Property & SMSF
Property and SMSF guides.
One roof
Accountant and mortgage broker, explained.
General advice warning: The information provided on this website is general in nature and does not constitute personal financial advice. Before making any financial decisions, you should consider your own circumstances and seek professional advice.
How the library works
Four clusters, one connected library.
The library is deliberately small and organised into four clusters: tax and business, borrowing and lending, property and SMSF, and the one-roof explainers that describe how the accounting and the credit-assistance sides of this practice fit together. Guides within a cluster cross-reference each other, because in practice the questions arrive connected — a structure question usually carries a borrowing question inside it, and a refinance question usually carries a deductibility question inside it.
Guides and the Technical Resource Centre do different jobs. A guide explains a concept that stays broadly stable from year to year — how negative gearing operates, why offset and redraw are treated differently, what a credit representative is. The Technical Resource Centre holds the moving parts: current-year rates, caps, thresholds and due dates, each figure dated and tied to its official source. Where a guide touches a current-year figure, it points to the resource that carries it rather than duplicating a number that will age.
Every guide is written and reviewed by the practitioner who does the client work, not a content agency. Guides are re-read when the rules they describe change — a Budget measure passing, a lodgement date moving, lender documentation expectations shifting — and periodically as part of general upkeep, rather than on a fixed publishing calendar. If a guide seems to conflict with a dated technical resource, the dated resource is the more current statement.
Where to start
Suggested reading paths by situation.
Buying your first home
Understand who you are dealing with before you compare anything.
Working for yourself? Add Self-Employed Home Loan Documents.
Investing in property
The tax mechanics first, then the loan structure that sits under them.
Then Depreciation Schedules Explained before your first full-year return.
Running a business
Structure shapes everything downstream — tax, records and borrowing power.
Borrowing through the entity? Read Trust & Company Borrower Documents.
Acting as an SMSF trustee
The compliance rules come before the property — read them in that order.
An LRBA involves both the fund’s accounts and its lending — the third guide explains how one practice coordinates both.
Inside each cluster
A curator’s note on every guide.
The situation paths above cross clusters. If you would rather read a whole cluster through, this is the order the practitioner would hand them to you in — and the one thing worth knowing about each guide before you open it.
Tax & business — read in this order
- Australian Tax Brackets — the primer; once marginal versus effective rates click, every later tax conversation gets shorter.
- Prepare for Your Tax Return — a pre-appointment checklist that also covers the tightened substantiation expectations.
- Sole Trader Tax Deductions — pairs each claim with the records the ATO expects, which is where claims actually fail.
- BAS Due Dates — the quarterly and monthly cycles, plus the agent lodgement extension many owners don’t know exists.
- Company vs Trust — the structural decision, including enacted changes that alter the comparison; don’t rely on an old reading.
- Depreciation Schedules Explained — sits on the border with the property cluster; how a quantity surveyor’s report feeds the return.
- Hills District Business Tax FAQ — the quickest read here; short answers to the questions local owners actually ask.
Borrowing & lending — read in this order
- Mortgage Broker vs Bank — start here if you have only ever walked into a branch; it explains what a panel is and who does the legwork.
- Credit Representative Explained — who actually holds the licence behind a broker; worth understanding before you sign anything.
- Tax Returns & Home Loans — the clearest bridge between the two halves of this practice: how lodged returns shape what a lender assesses.
- Self-Employed Borrowing Capacity — how lenders read business income, add-backs included; a companion to your last two returns.
- Self-Employed Home Loan Documents — the checklist version of the guide above; open it before you start gathering paperwork.
- Trust & Company Borrower Documents — for entity borrowers: the deeds, constitutions and ASIC extracts lenders will ask for.
Property & SMSF — read in this order
- How Negative Gearing Works — covers the enacted quarantining changes, so read the current version even if you know the old rules.
- Property Investor Deductions — repairs versus improvements is the hinge of most disputed claims; this guide dwells on it deliberately.
- Offset, Redraw & Tax — the shortest guide with the most expensive mistake in it: the mixed-purpose borrowing trap.
- When to Refinance — the review triggers, weighed honestly against the switching costs that quietly erode any saving.
- SMSF Property Rules — the compliance boundaries first: sole purpose, related parties and the residential restrictions.
- How an SMSF Buys Property — the LRBA sequence step by step, including the recently enacted change affecting new arrangements.
One roof — read in this order
- Accountant vs Mortgage Broker — the two professions compared; useful for deciding which question you actually have.
- Accountant & Mortgage Broker — what the combined role does in practice, and where the tax scope ends and the credit scope begins.
- One Roof Explained — the workflow itself: why documents are requested once and read twice, and where the roles stay separate.
This is the smallest cluster because it describes one idea from three angles. If you only read one, read the third — it is the most concrete.
After the guide
From a guide to a service page.
Guides and service pages answer different questions. A guide explains how something works in general; the matching service page explains how this practice handles it — what the engagement covers, which documents it needs and where its scope ends. The process page describes the engagement sequence itself, and the fees page explains how pricing is structured before any engagement letter is issued.
The tax and business cluster sits in front of the accounting services — most directly individual tax returns, business structure advice and BAS lodgement. The borrowing and lending cluster leads to the finance pages, particularly self-employed home loans, pre-approval and refinancing.
The property and SMSF cluster pairs with rental property tax, investment property loans and SMSF property loans and LRBAs — the trustee guides in particular are background reading, not a substitute for the compliance work those pages describe. The one-roof explainers lead to accounting and lending for business owners, which turns the concept into an actual engagement path.
Editorial standards
How a topic earns a guide.
A guide is written when the same question keeps arriving in real engagements — asked by different clients, in different words, often enough that a careful written answer serves people better than repeating it call by call — the questions clients actually ask decide the topic list.
The second test is stability. A guide has to explain something that will still be true next quarter — a mechanism, a distinction, a process. If the honest answer is a figure that resets each year, it belongs in the Technical Resource Centre instead. If the honest answer is “it depends entirely on your circumstances”, it stays a conversation topic rather than becoming a page that could mislead by generalising.
That is also why some obvious-seeming topics are absent. Where general information risks being read as personal advice — a specific structure recommendation, a borrowing decision — the deliberate choice is not to publish, and to keep that ground for the scoping call.
One question we are asked
Can I suggest a topic for a new guide?
Yes — send it through the contact page, ideally with the question phrased the way you would actually ask it. Suggestions are weighed against the same two tests as everything else here: is the question recurring, and can it be answered accurately in general terms? Topics that pass join the writing queue, though there is no promised timeframe. Topics that fail the second test usually become a scoping-call conversation instead, which is often the faster route to your actual answer.
Beyond the guides
The Technical Resource Centre
Guides explain concepts; the Technical Resource Centre tracks the moving parts — current-year rates, thresholds, caps and due dates — with every figure dated, sourced from official publications and re-verified on a schedule. Six collections cover tax and accounting, business, BAS and payroll, mortgage and lending, property investors, SMSF and superannuation and regulatory updates.
Visit the Technical Resource Centre
Have a question a guide didn’t answer?
Talk it through on a scoping call.
Guides are general information. For advice on your circumstances, book a 20-minute call before any engagement letter.