1. Reconcile Income And Expenses
Pull a full-year statement of rent received and expenses paid — management fees, repairs, insurance, rates, and body corporate if applicable. Your property manager should be able to hand you this as a single report, not a folder of invoices to sort yourself.
2. Get Your Depreciation Schedule Current
A quantity surveyor's depreciation schedule captures capital works and plant and equipment deductions most owners miss. If you've never had one done, or it's several years old and the property's had work done since, it's worth revisiting before you lodge.
Depreciation is the deduction owners forget because no cash changes hands to remind them. It's still real money.
3. Separate Repairs From Capital Improvements
Repairs (fixing what's broken) and capital improvements (upgrading what wasn't) are treated differently for tax purposes. Getting this split wrong is one of the most common — and most costly — mistakes property investors make. Your records should classify each expense at the time it's incurred, not reconstructed months later.
4. Review Performance And Plan The Year Ahead
Once the numbers are reconciled, use them. Compare this year's rent, vacancy and cost position to the year before, and to the market. Tax time is a natural checkpoint to ask whether the property's management is still structured for growth — or just for compliance.
5. Confirm Your Records Will Hold Up To Scrutiny
An accountant can only work with what you give them, and the ATO can only accept what's properly substantiated. Before you hand everything over, confirm every deduction has a corresponding invoice or statement, that the depreciation schedule is the current version, and that anything claimed as an immediate deduction versus depreciated over time is classified consistently with prior years. A property manager running proper reporting should be able to hand you a clean, audit-ready pack rather than leaving you to reconstruct it from memory.