This post follows from Part 5 - Weekly and Monthly Routine Tasks.

The Business Activity Statement (BAS) is a form that businesses registered for GST in Australia are required to use to report their GST and other forms of tax e.g. PAYG tax withheld, PAYG instalments, Fringe Benefits Tax and Wine Equalisation Tax.

If your business isn’t registered in Australia, and in other countries, we have guides for the following that might be useful:

• New Zealand - How to Prepare NZ GST Return in Xero
• United States - How to Set up Form 1099 in Xero for reporting to IRS
• United Kingdom - How to prepare your VAT return for reporting to HM Revenue and Customs

Xero allows you to prepare and submit your BAS online making it easy to meet your tax requirements. You’ll need to have adviser status in Xero to do it. Here’s a guide on how to change your user status in Xero.

So here’s how to prepare your BAS in Xero:

1. Make sure all your accounts are complete - that means everything that’s supposed to be in Xero is in Xero and your bank reconciliations are done.
2. Process all your payroll. Here’s a link on how to process your payroll in Xero. Once that’s done, go to Reports > “Payroll Activity Summary” report. Print that report (tip: you can save it as a pdf on your computer instead if you like) You’ll need it for Point 4 later.
3. Go to Adviser > Activity Statement - update the dates for your BAS e.g. if you’re quarterly you’d enter the starting date for the quarter and the end date. Once you’ve updated the date and what type of report - choose “Business Activity Statement”, click Update. An example is shown below.
   
4. Fill out the remaining fields needed on the BAS. GST fields are mostly pre-population from the transactions you enter into Xero (that’s why transaction entering should be checked!). There are some that need to be filled and you’ll be able to get the information for this from the report you printed out in Step 2 above.
   1. W1 - Total salary, wages and other payments
   2. W2 - Amount withheld from payments shown at W1
   3. W4 - Amount withheld where no ABN is quoted
   4. W3 - Other amounts withheld (excluding any amount shown in W2 or W4)
   5. 7 or 5B - Deferred company/fund instalment or Credit from PAYG income tax instalment variation - this is something the ATO will usually let you know if you need to put a figure in here.
      
5. Now that you’ve put in all the figures, click the green “Publish” button at the bottom.
6. Last part - you’ll need to lodge it via the ATO portal (you have the values so it should be easy peasy!)

Now that’s done, let’s move onto the next part - Part 7 - Reports in Xero.