This is my journey to apply the book, Unfck your finances. The book is about personal finances but I’ve added actions specific to working for myself.*
If you want a bit more context, the prelude pieces are Hope can be scary, Why do we never talk about personal finance?, and Getting my shit together: the plan for the next quarter.
Yesterday was money day.
I registered for GST, split my business and personal expenses, and defined my bookkeeping rituals (most people call these standard operating procedures).
I’m not done but the skeleton is there. Let me tell you about GST.
GST Registration There are 3 ways you can do this:
When I called the ATO, I received a very kind but overly unhelpful automated message saying that they’re busy and they can’t take my call. In the week leading up to the end of financial year, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I called twice more, just in case there had been a mistake. There hadn’t been.
I would have given up, except that I had promised myself (and stated publicly in a few places to keep me accountable) that I would register for GST by 1 July. I decided to try the Business Portal path.
Accessing the Business Portal…isn’t straightforward. I’ve had an ABN for a few years but that’s not enough to get you onto the Business Portal. You need an AusKEY or MyGov and something called RAM (not the computer kind).
I tried AusKEY first. It turns out that this is a Chrome or Firefox add-on that gives you a unique identifier to access your account. You can also run it off a USB stick. The USB option is probably more secure but I was more worried about getting it working.
I had to verify my identity first. That was ok. I filled out the form. I had the ID I needed. I installed AusKEY. And…it didn’t work.
I attempted to log into the Business Portal but AusKEY didn’t come up as an option. I tried in two browsers. I probably should have tried resetting the computer but I was on Focusmate and I didn’t want to kill the call when there was another option. I ignored the troubleshooting suggestions and decided to give the MyGov option a try.
RAM stands for Relationship Access Manager. I just followed the pages that came up, downloaded an app, verified my identification again, and it worked.
The Business Portal is not the prettiest or most user-friendly thing. There was an instructions page that saved me.
And so I registered for GST.
The whole process took me around 45 minutes.
I’ll probably only ever do this once in my life. Thank goodness.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you about how I split my business and personal expenses. The day after I’ll talk about how I defined my bookkeeping rituals (most people call these standard operating procedures).