Tax Tip: Prepaying Expenses

As a small business in Australia, there’s a special rule around prepayment of expenses – what you’re able to do is claim up to 12 months’ worth of prepayments. 

Let’s say your business rents an office, or a building, or a warehouse, you can actually claim up to 12 months’ prepayments. So if you pay six months in advance of, let’s say 5 grand a month, thats $30k in rental payments. If you make them by 30 June in the financial year, you can claim them even though they apply for future months. So, again, the rule is 12 months – If you pay two years in advance, it doesn’t quite work, but up to 12 month prepayment is pretty cool. 

So, things we normally see here are, if you know you’ve got travel coming up, then you might look at booking flights and accommodation in advance. If you need to top up the printer, paper or stationery cupboard a little bit earlier than you might need to, knowing that you’ll have those expenses over the next few months anyway. 

You can even prepay your accounting fees, so it’s pretty cool. So keep in mind, 30% of whatever you earn is your tax rate. For every $10,000 that you prepay, that’s 3 grand in tax savings for the current year. So keep that all in mind when you’re looking to prepay or bring forward expenses.