Get Ready Guide
Everything you need to prepare for your Tax Return with RocketTax
Express Tax – How It Works
1) Read through the checklist below and make sure you have everything handy before you begin.2) The Express Tax form starts with your personal details, and then works through your employment income, private health insurance and tax deductions. If you have business income or rental properties there are sections for those too. There will be space at the end of each section for you to add any comments or extra deductions. You can save your progress at various points along the way (we cannot recover your password so please store this carefully!). This should take you 15-20 minutes depending on the complexity of your return.
3) Once you’ve submitted your form, we’ll email you a checklist of any extra documents we might need from you, or you may have nothing to send.
4) I’ll let you know via email if I have any questions, or if not, then I’ll email to confirm that your tax return is in our queue.
5) From this point, I’ll usually begin processing your tax return within about two weeks, but in peak tax season this may stretch to three weeks. If I have any questions or suggested extra deductions we will chat back and forth via email.
6) Once your tax return is complete I’ll email it to you for review and signature. I’ll also send your invoice at this time. You can pay by credit card, bank transfer or PayPal
7) Once your return has been lodged, the ATO’s usual processing time is 12 business days, although this can take slightly longer in peak tax season. Once your return has been finalised they’ll send your Notice of Assessment to your MyGov. If you have a tax refund, they will deposit it into your bank account. If you have a tax bill, your NoA will have your payment details, or you can set up a payment arrangement via your MyGov.
Documents & Information Needed
Information You DON’T Need – Provided by the ATO
Thanks to electronic reporting, the ATO already has most of your income information. So you don’t need to send us these documents. Instead, we’ll access these figures directly from the ATO.
If you’re submitting your Express Tax form in early July, your data may take a week or two to become available. Please don’t begin your Express Tax form until all your income is showing as Tax Ready on your MyGov report.
- PAYG Payment Summaries – your employer will upload your payroll information directly to the ATO, and we will download it for you (you can also access it yourself through MyGov). It may take your employer a week or two to finalise this process after the end of the financial year.
- Private Health Insurance Statement
- Centrelink Income
- Bank Interest
- Dividend Income
- Most Managed Funds – note that these can take a few weeks or even months to become available
Information You DO Need To Have Ready
- Capital Gains – purchase and sale details for any shares, property or other assets sold
- Foreign Income
- Tax Deductions – the Express Tax form will guide you through every possible tax deduction. This will help jog your memory on any tax deductions you may have forgotten, as well as deductions you didn’t know you could claim. See below for tips and suggestions.
- Spouse name, date of birth and approximate taxable income
Long-Term Rental Properties
- Agent’s Statement
- Interest paid on loan for the financial year
- Other Expenses – insurance, council rates, water rates, repairs & maintenance, body corporate
- Depreciation Schedule – if you have one
Airbnb & Short-Term Rental Properties
- If you have an Airbnb, please lodge your tax return through our sister firm EasyBnbTax, also run by Jess.
Business or ABN Income
- Total of Income Earned
- Expenses – we need a total for each category of expenses, (materials, tools, stationery etc), preferably summarised in spreadsheet format. The rules for motor vehicle expenses noted above are the same for businesses.
- Prior Year Tax Return – if your tax return last year wasn’t prepared by RocketTax, and you claimed depreciation or had carried forward losses, please provide a copy of that prior year return.
Tax Deductions
Receipts or records are required for all deductions, except where we’ve noted that an estimate is allowed. The ATO prefers receipts and tax invoices, but accepts bank statements or other records where a receipt isn’t available. Scanned or digital copies of your physical receipts are acceptable to the ATO. You need to keep your receipts and records for five years. You don’t need to send us your receipts and records, as long as you have them available at home if the Tax Office should ask for them.The Express Tax form will guide you through all of the following deductions to help jog your memory for expenses you may have forgotten about or that you didn’t know you could claim. If you have any expenses you’re not sure about, pop them in the comments field at the end of the deductions section and I’ll get back to you via email.
- Car Deductions
- Cents per Kilometre Method – for the 2025 financial year you can claim 88 cents per km for up to 5,000km of work-related travel. This gives a maximum tax deduction of $4,400. If you haven’t kept a logbook this financial year, the cents per km method is your only option. You don’t have to have specific records of your kilometres. Instead, you can make a reasonable estimate based on your patterns of work, diary notes etc. For example, you visit a client once per month which is a 50km round trip, and you attended three seminars for the year in the CBD being 20km return.
- Logbook Method – If you have kept a valid logbook you’ll be eligible to claim a percentage of your car running costs, including fuel, registration, insurance, servicing, repairs, tyres and other maintenance costs. Please have a summary of these expenses ready. If applicable, you can also claim interest on your car loan (this requires your total interest paid, or copies of loan setup documents), and depreciation on your car (this requires your car purchase date and price).
- Travel, accommodation, parking
- Tolls and public transport – you can either add up your specific trips, or add up your total bills for the year and advise us what percentage is work use
- Uniform and protective clothing
- Union fees, registration fees, professional memberships
- Education, courses and professional development
- Police checks, working with children checks
- Mobile phone and internet – monthly cost and estimated work percentage
- Home office expenses – from 1 July 2022 onwards, the ATO have totally changed the rules for claiming home office hours. We used to use a cents per hour rate to claim your electricity, and we could also make separate claims for things like mobile phone, internet, stationery and computer expenses. There were no special recordkeeping requirements, so it was an easy deduction to add on top of your other work from home expenses. Now, it’s a different story. The ATO bumped the set rate up to 67 cents per hour, but if you use this method, you can’t claim a bunch of your other work expenses, meaning no deductions for mobile phone, internet, electricity, stationery and computer expenses. Under these new rules, the vast majority of people will be worse off using the 67cph method. So for the vast majority of our clients we’ll be claiming your actual mobile phone, internet, stationery and computer expenses, rather than the 67cph method, and this will lead to a larger tax deduction overall.
- Electricity – this is a new deduction as part of the home office deduction changes. You must refer to your bank statements and add up your electricity expenses paid between 1 July and 30 June (regardless of the billing period).
- Stationery, computer expenses, software, antivirus, apps
- Assets over $300 – iPads, computers, mobile phones etc – we will need the exact purchase date and the purchase price of each individual asset
- Donations
- Tax Agent’s Fees from last year’s tax return
- Income Protection Insurance
- After-Tax Super Contributions – If you made additional after-tax super contributions during the financial year, you have the option of claiming a tax deduction for them if you wish (not applicable to regular employer contributions or pre-tax/salary packaged contributions). Be aware that if you claim a tax deduction for after-tax super contributions in your personal tax return you’ll receive a tax benefit at your marginal tax rate, but you will be taxed an additional 15% on the contributions within your super fund. You will also be ineligible for any other benefits on that amount, such as the government co-contribution. The choice is yours whether you wish to claim the tax deduction or not. (Please note that RocketTax is not a licensed financial planner and so we can’t advise you on this. If you need help deciding you can chat to your super fund.) If you would like to claim a tax deduction you must first advise your super fund, and receive written confirmation from them that they have received your request. Your super fund should have instructions on their website.
Tax Tips For Maximising Your Deductions
- Our list above should give you quite a few ideas of what’s deductible. In addition, the ATO have information on their website about deductions you can claim.
- The ATO also have some great deduction guides for specific occupations explaining what you can and can’t claim. There are guides for teachers, nurses, airline employees, police officers, fitness industry workers, hairdressers, sales reps, hospitality workers and many more. Be sure to check if there’s one for your industry.
- Your bank statements are a great source of information. Try exporting your statements for the year to Excel and sorting them alphabetically. This will make it easier to look for potential tax deductions.
- Flick back through your diary or calendar to remind yourself of courses, seminars or travel expenses.
- Search your email inbox for the words ‘receipt’ and ‘invoice’, you might find purchases you’ve forgotten about.
- If you use your phone or iPad/tablet for work, you may have purchased apps that are tax deductible. Log onto your iTunes or Google Play account and see if you’ve paid for any apps that you use for work.
- Don’t forget about monthly or yearly online subscriptions that you use for work, such as Microsoft Office, Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Adobe, and your anti-virus.
- If you don’t have one already, create a folder in your email inbox called ‘Tax’, and save all your incoming receipts there ready for next tax time. If you find it hard to hang onto physical receipts, just take a photo on your phone straight away (even while still standing at the checkout!) and email it to yourself to save in your ‘Tax’ inbox folder.
I look forward to working with you!
Jess Murray CPA
Director
