SBR Program Director seeks your views (transcript)

SBR Program Director Paul Madden: Hi. I’m Paul Madden. I’m the Program Director for the Standard Business Reporting program.

I’d like to welcome you to the SBR blog, which will be a facility for you to get information about SBR and contribute to how the conversation about SBR and its implementation is going.

From the first of July 2010, reporting to government will become a lot simpler with the introduction of Standard Business Reporting.

SBR is not just an online reporting system. You’ve currently got access to portals. You have access to other online facilities to report to government. What this does is it brings it back in to your accounting system so that your accounting system becomes your portal to report to government. And, again, it’s not just about online reporting. It’s about making it easier for you to complete your reports so that you can take advantage of some of the automation of those reporting processes inside of your system.

For some of the simpler forms, you get pre-fill information from the government. You get information required on your business activity statement (that comes from the Tax Office) directly pre-filled. You’ll also get the value of the information in your accounting software, which is required to fill out things like the business activity statement. Once it’s been filled by that information from the government and your own software, you’ll be able to check it. You’ll be able to change it. You can edit it. You can add those things that are absent because they’re not part of your accounting system, if that’s the way it works. Then, you’ll be able to send it directly from your accounting system as if that’s your portal to report to government.

The difference for you is the information that’s required on the form is being pre-filled by your system. You don’t have to rekey it into another portal. You don’t have to go and login to another portal. You don’t have to save it and export those files somehow to the government. You’ll be able to send it directly from your own accounting system.

To do that, we’ve also provided you with a new facility called AUSkey.

AUSkey will be a single sign-on to the government agencies in SBR scope. It will be available from April 2010, and it will allow you a single credential and a single password to report to all of the agencies in our scope (if you in fact have a reporting obligation with them).

SBR will be available through many software systems available in the Australian market from 1 July, 2010.

We have a lot of forms in our scope that cover the agencies in SBR and each software developer will target those forms most applicable to the types of software that they support, and the industries that they support as well.

So you do need to look at what facilities will exist in your software sometime after the first of July, and the use and support of SBR across software will increase after one July.

If you do want more information — and you want to share your views with other interested accountants, software developers and other businesses — this blog is a good place for you to do that. You’ll be able to share your views and see the views and opinions of others in the industry, and also get up-to-date information about where SBR’s headed, including things like the 25 March release, which gave more information and more specifications to allow software developers to embed this in their systems from July.

So I hope the blog is useful for you, and I hope you keep track of the conversations happening here. And, again, we do value your opinions and we hope that you share them with us.

Thank you.