Invoices, quotes, Xero and the BAS. The part of the week nobody pays you for.
Nobody started a business to retype the same address into three systems. This is about getting that time back, and about knowing which parts a machine should never be allowed near.
Where the week actually goes. And why the best number is seven years old.
Everybody in this industry quotes a figure for what admin costs an Australian small business. Almost nobody says where it came from, how old it is, or who paid for it. Here it is with all three attached, so you can decide what it is worth.
hours a year on admin and red tape for the average Australian small business, which works out at about 10 hours a week.1
what the same study put the annual cost at per business, and AU$20.16 billion across the country.1
of Australian businesses spend more than AU$20,000 a year on compliance, and 42% say regulation is actively harming how they operate. That one is from last November.2
Why we are printing a seven-year-old number
Because it is the best one that exists, and because the alternative is worse. The 541 hours comes from a 2019 study of more than 1,300 Australian small business leaders, published by a company that sells accounting software, with no fieldwork dates given. All three of those are reasons to hold it loosely, and we would rather you knew them.
We went looking for something newer and Australian. There is a widely circulated claim that a well-known accounting platform publishes an admin-hours figure. It does not, and the number attributed to it traces to a consultancy blog with no primary source behind it. A figure that cannot be checked is not evidence, whoever’s logo is next to it.
Sources + notes
- Reckon, In The Zone, 1 May 2019. More than 1,300 Australian small business leaders. Australian, and genuinely a study rather than a laundered figure. Flags: seven years old, published by a company selling accounting software, and no fieldwork dates are stated. The 10 hours a week is our own division of 541 by 52, not a published figure.
- Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 2025 Small Business Conditions Survey, conducted with Intuit. Media release 10 November 2025, more than 1,100 business owners and decision-making managers. Both figures read from ACCI’s own release. A third figure from the same survey, that 39% spend more than six hours a week on compliance, is quoted widely but sits in a report PDF we could not open, so it is not on this page.
What a machine should do, and what it must not touch.
The useful question is never whether AI can do a job. It is whether a wrong answer would be obvious, cheap and reversible. That single test sorts almost everything, and it is the one we use.
Safe, reversible, and you can see it working
Nothing here leaves your business without a human seeing it first, and every one of them is undoable.
- Chasing unpaid invoices on a schedule, in your words, stopping the moment somebody pays
- Turning a photo of a receipt into a coded transaction, ready for review
- Drafting a quote from the notes you took on site, for you to check and price
- Pulling this week’s numbers out of three systems onto one page, every Monday
- Writing the first draft of anything you would otherwise stare at: a job ad, a policy, a customer email
- Turning a voice note from the ute into a written job record
Right most of the time, and wrong expensively
These work well and they fail quietly, which is the dangerous combination. A person signs off every time.
- Coding bank transactions, where a plausible wrong category is worse than a blank one
- Anything that reaches a customer with a price on it
- Anything touching payroll, entitlements or hours
- Summarising a contract or a quote you are about to accept
- Anything where the answer sounds confident and you cannot easily check it
Where somebody else’s money or the law is involved
We will explain any of these and we will not build them. Two of them we are not allowed to do for a fee at all.
- Lodging your BAS, or working out what goes in it, for a fee
- Deciding what is deductible, or anything that is really tax advice
- Putting customer personal information into a tool nobody has checked
- Anything designed to look like a person when it is not
- Anything you could not comfortably explain to the customer it affects
The middle column is where money gets lost. A tool that is right nine times out of ten and confident all ten times is more dangerous than one that is obviously useless, because the tenth one goes out with your name on it.
Two of these jobs nobody may do for you for a fee.
Preparing a BAS and advising on what you can claim are not merely difficult. They are regulated activities, and doing them for payment without the registration is an offence. Any AI bookkeeping product that does not raise this with you either has not read the rules or is hoping you will not.
- Doing your own BAS needs no registration at all
- This is the part people get backwards. The law turns on whether somebody is paid. If you or your own employee prepares and lodges your BAS, no registration is required and no rule stands in your way.3 The moment somebody outside your business charges a fee or takes a reward for it, they must be a registered BAS agent.
- The penalty is real, and the published figure is out of date
- Providing BAS services for a fee while unregistered carries 250 penalty units for an individual and 1,250 for a company. The Tax Practitioners Board’s own pages convert those to AU$82,500 and AU$412,500. Those numbers are stale: the Commonwealth penalty unit rose from AU$330 to AU$364 on 1 July 2026, which puts the real exposure at roughly AU$91,000 and AU$455,000.3 We mention it because if a supplier quotes you the old figures, they are reading a webpage rather than the law.
- Your bookkeeper now needs your permission to put your data into AI
- This is five weeks old and almost nobody knows about it. The Tax Practitioners Board issued guidance on 22 July 2026 saying tax practitioners “must obtain permission from each client prior to divulging client information to a third party (which can include entering client information into AI models and tools, depending on how these tools are configured and used)”.4 If your bookkeeper has started using AI and has not asked you, that is a conversation worth having this week.
- The same guidance says the human stays accountable
- In the Board’s words: AI models “may hallucinate or provide inaccurate information and as such cannot be relied on as a replacement for tax knowledge, experience or expertise”, outputs should be verified at every step, and each of those steps “should be documented”.4 That is a regulator describing exactly the middle column of the tier list above.
- The Privacy Act probably does not apply to you, and that is not a licence
- Most Australian businesses turning over less than AU$3 million a year are exempt from the Privacy Act, and that exemption is still in force today.5 You will read in a lot of places that it is being removed from 10 December 2026. We went looking for the source of that and there is not one, so we are not going to repeat it. What the privacy regulator does say, and what we follow whether or not it binds you, is not to enter personal information into publicly available generative AI tools.5
- Records: five years, and digital is fine
- Most business records have to be kept for five years from the later of getting the record or completing what it relates to. Some company and employee records run to seven. Digital records are acceptable on their own, and if you keep them you do not need paper copies as well unless a specific rule says so.6 Quarterly BAS is due on 28 October, 28 February, 28 April and 28 July, straight from the GST Act rather than a summary of it.
One thing we could not find, and it matters
There is no current, credible, independently published Australian figure for how long a small business actually spends on its BAS or its GST. We looked at the Tax Office, the Board of Taxation, Treasury, the Bureau of Statistics, the Productivity Commission, the Ombudsman, the Chamber of Commerce and the accounting platforms. Several accounting blogs state confident-sounding numbers attributed to the Tax Office; none of them cite a document, and we could not find one.
The Board of Taxation’s Red Tape Reduction Review was due to report to Government by 30 June 2026 and has not published. That is the most likely source of a real number, and we will put it on this page the day it exists.
Sources + notes
- Tax Agent Services Act 2009 (Cth), sections 50-5 and 90-10, Compilation No. 26, 21 February 2025. Section 50-5(2)(b) turns the offence on a “fee or other reward”, which is why doing your own is unregulated. Penalty-unit conversions are ours, at the AU$364 value applying to conduct on or after 1 July 2026; the Tax Practitioners Board pages read on 29 August 2026 still convert at AU$330.
- Tax Practitioners Board, TPB(GS) 55/2026 The use of Artificial Intelligence and the Code of Professional Conduct, issued 22 July 2026, read 29 August 2026. It applies to registered tax agents and BAS agents. We found no equivalent Australian Taxation Office guidance, but the Tax Office site was unreachable from where we were checking, so treat that as not found rather than as proof it does not exist.
- Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) section 6D, Compilation No. 104, 4 June 2026, which still carries the AU$3,000,000 threshold. Some categories of small business are covered regardless of turnover, including health service providers and businesses that trade in personal information. The generative AI recommendation is from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, published 21 October 2024 and last updated 17 January 2025. On the claim that the exemption is removed from 10 December 2026: no credible source. It is not in the current compilation and we could find it only on secondary commentary.
- business.gov.au, record keeping, read 29 August 2026. Quarterly BAS dates from the A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999, section 31-8, Compilation No. 96, 1 January 2026. Registered agents can attract later concessional dates; that part is reported rather than verified, because the Tax Office pages were unreachable.
What Xero and MYOB actually ship. Not what the pricing page implies.
Both are adding AI quickly and some of it is genuinely good. Read the labels though, because a feature listed alongside the ones you are paying for is not necessarily finished. We checked both on 29 August 2026.
| Feature | Status | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Xero, JAX chat | Live | Generally available to Australian subscribers at no extra charge. Answers questions about your own data, does general research, and will draft an invoice from a previous quote if you ask it to. There is no off switch: Xero’s advice if you would rather not use it is that you can leave it unopened.7 |
| Xero, Auto Bank Reconciliation | Beta | Still in beta as at 19 August 2026, and this is the one to watch, because Xero’s own pricing page lists it as a plan feature with no beta label on it. It has reconciled over 100 million transactions and Xero says nearly three in four customers report time saved, with no method published for that figure.7 |
| MYOB, AI BAS | Beta | Labelled beta on MYOB’s own comparison table, and it is a paid add-on rather than included: usage-tiered at AU$25, AU$40 or AU$70 a month on top of your subscription.8 |
| MYOB, Business Insights + Smart Reconciliation | Beta | Both carry MYOB’s beta label. Category Suggestions and Smart Invoice Reminders do not, so those two are the finished ones.8 |
| Is GST in the price | Mixed | Xero states it plainly: prices are in Australian dollars and include GST. MYOB is less consistent on its own pages, labelling some figures GST-inclusive and saying nothing on others. If you are comparing the two on price, confirm at checkout rather than on the pricing page.8 |
| Electronic invoicing | No mandate | You will be told a mandate lands in 2026. It does not, for you. Treasury consulted on a Business eInvoicing Right in 2021 and never enacted it. What does exist is a target on Commonwealth agencies as buyers, which is a rule about government, not about your business.9 |
None of this is a reason to avoid either product. Both are good, both are getting better quickly, and one of them is almost certainly already in your business. It is a reason to know which parts are finished before you build a quarter’s bookkeeping on them, and a reason to be suspicious of anybody quoting you a time saving they cannot source. A “saves 22 hours a month” claim circulates widely and we could not find it on any page the vendor publishes, so it is not on this one.
Sources + notes
- Xero Australian pricing and JAX pages, plus the Xero blog post What’s new in Auto Bank Reconciliation, published 14 August 2026 and last updated 19 August 2026. All read 29 August 2026.
- MYOB Australian pricing and AI BAS product pages, read 29 August 2026. Beta labels are MYOB’s own, taken from its pricing comparison table.
- Treasury consultation on a Business eInvoicing Right, 2021, which was consulted on and not enacted. The Commonwealth buyer-side targets are reported rather than verified, because the government pages carrying them were unreachable when we checked.
What Get More Done actually is.
Five weeks, six pieces of work, all of it inside software you already own and pay for. The first piece usually saves more than the rest put together, and it involves no technology at all.
The six pieces of work
- The week mapped before anything is automatedWe sit with whoever actually does the admin and write down every repeating job, how long it takes and what it touches.
The detail
Most of what comes out of this is not automated at all. It is stopped, merged or simplified, and that costs nothing.
- The repetitive jobs, automatedInvoice chasing, receipt coding, the Monday numbers, the quote draft, the job record.
The detail
Built inside the accounts you already own, on the software you already pay for, with a human in the loop wherever the tier list above says there has to be one.
- Your systems talking to each otherThe reason an enquiry gets typed in three times is that three tools have never been introduced.
The detail
Connecting your accounting, quoting and email is usually where the hours actually come from, and it is the least glamorous part of this work.
- Your people trained on your real workNot a slide deck and not a generic course.
The detail
Whoever runs your front desk, your quoting or your books gets shown how to drive this on live jobs, until they can do it without us. Training is a deliverable here with time booked against it.
- Plain-English rules for what can go into an AI toolOne page your team can actually follow: what may be pasted into a chatbot and what may not, which tools are approved, what to do when something looks wrong, and who to ask.
The detail
Written for the person doing the job, not for a lawyer.
- The baseline, before anything changesHours on the named jobs, how long an invoice takes to get paid, and how many times a week somebody retypes something.
The detail
Recorded on day one, so what you see at 90 days is a comparison and not a story.
Training is the deliverable, not the afterthought.
The evidence on this is unusually clear and unusually ignored. The binding constraint on Australian businesses getting anything out of AI is not the price of the software and it is not appetite. It is that nobody in the building knows how to use it, and almost nobody is planning to fix that.
of Australian businesses name insufficient staff skills as a barrier to adopting technology. It is the most-cited barrier, ahead of cost at 13%.10
say the thing that would most increase their confidence in AI is seeing a working example in a business like theirs.11
name guidance from a bank, accountant or trusted adviser. Dead last of every option offered.11
of Australian small business employers have no plans to offer AI training to anyone.12
The finding that should worry an adviser
That 32% against 7% is not our reading. It is NAB’s, and the bank’s own conclusion is that “advisers are not yet the obvious first port of call for AI support”.11 A consultancy publishing that about its own category is either careless or means it. We mean it: it is why the first conversation is free and why we would rather show you something working in your business than present a deck about ours.
It is also worth knowing what Australian firms under 20 staff actually spend technology money on. In the best-documented survey of that segment the top three were accounting software at 33.8%, computer equipment at 33.1% and a website at 29.7%. AI does not appear in the top three at all.13
And the uncomfortable part of the same survey: only 29.6% of Australian respondents said their technology investment improved profitability, against a survey average of 56.3% across eleven markets.13 Australian small businesses are buying technology and not getting paid back for it. That is a training and fit problem, not a software problem, and it is the exact gap this package exists to close.
- On your real jobs, not a sandbox and not a sample dataset.
- With the person who will actually do it, not with the owner who will pass it on.
- Booked as hours in the scope, with a cost against them, so it cannot get quietly dropped when the build runs late.
- Finished when somebody can do it while we watch and say nothing, rather than when the calendar says so.
Sources + notes
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, Characteristics of Australian Business 2024-25, released 25 June 2026. Nearly 7,000 businesses, compulsory collection. The strongest-provenance source on this page.
- NAB Behavioural & Industry Economics, Beyond the Hype: What SMEs Want from AI, August 2026. The report contains no methodology statement at all: no sample size, no fieldwork dates, no definition of SME and no panel provider. A figure of 700 SMEs appears only on NAB’s web article. We are quoting it because the finding is useful and NAB has no commercial reason to publish it, and we are telling you what is missing.
- MYOB Business Monitor, 22 April 2026, more than 1,000 Australian SMEs. MYOB sells AI features and publishes no methodology statement.
- CPA Australia, Asia-Pacific Small Business Survey 2025-26. Online survey of organisations with fewer than 20 employees, November to December 2025, 4,166 businesses across 11 markets including 436 Australian respondents. The best-documented survey in this bank and the closest match to a business of two to twenty people.
Everybody is using AI already. Mostly, that depends who you asked.
Same country, overlapping periods, the same question about small business AI adoption. The answers run from 11% to 67%. We are printing the spread rather than picking a number out of it, because the spread is the honest answer and any single figure invites a challenge nobody can win.
| Source | Figure | What it actually measured |
|---|---|---|
| Australian Bureau of Statistics | 12% | All businesses using AI in 2024-25. Micro and small sit at about 11%. A compulsory national collection of nearly 7,000 businesses, and the strongest provenance in this table. |
| MYOB Business Monitor | 40% | Vendor survey. Defines its market as businesses with 0 to 1,000 employees, so a 300-person firm and a three-person cafe are both in it. |
| NAB | 40% | Bank survey. Does not define what it means by SME anywhere in the report. |
| National AI Centre | 43 to 44% | Government tracker. Reported rather than verified: the site timed out on four attempts. |
| COSBOA with CommBank | about 52% | Industry survey. Reported rather than verified. |
| Deloitte Access Economics | about 67% | Commissioned by Amazon. A vendor-commissioned panel, and the highest number in the set. |
| Xero | 61% | New Zealand, not Australia. Defines adoption as any AI-enabled tool adopted with the intention of adding value, which captures a sole trader using free ChatGPT once a week. |
Three things drive the gap
What counts as using AI. One definition in this table captures a sole trader using free ChatGPT once a week. The Bureau of Statistics asks about AI incorporated into business processes, which is a far higher bar. Same businesses, six-fold difference.
Who is in the sample. One survey defines its market as businesses with 0 to 1,000 employees. Another restricts to fewer than 20. One does not define SME anywhere at all.
Who paid for it. The highest numbers in the table come from organisations selling into the market they are measuring. That does not make them false. It makes them worth reading with the sponsor in mind, which is why the sponsor is named in the row.
What this means for you
If you have not started, you are not behind in the way you have been told. On the best-evidenced Australian measure, roughly nine in ten small businesses have not incorporated AI into how they work either.
The useful version of the urgency argument is narrower and truer: businesses that are already innovating adopt at 19%, against 4% for those doing nothing.14 Adoption follows a posture rather than a sector. It is not too late, and there is no prize for panicking.
Sources, and the figures missing on purpose
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, Characteristics of Australian Business 2024-25, released 25 June 2026. Small businesses that were innovation-active adopted AI at 19%, against 4% for those undertaking no innovation activity.
Three figures you will see elsewhere are missing on purpose. “95% of AI projects fail” comes from a study of custom enterprise tools that found 40% deployment for general-purpose ones in the same breath, and contains no Australian small business content whatsoever. “AI-using businesses grow 2.8 times faster” is one vendor’s own platform data with no method published, and the causation plausibly runs backwards, since growing businesses buy more software. And a widely-repeated claim that 76% of AI users reported higher profitability is attributed to a report that does not contain it: all 162 pages were checked, and the same report points the other way.
How the five weeks run.
A week longer than the other two packages, because the mapping week and the training week are both real weeks with your people in them rather than something we do quietly in the background.
- Week one
The free chat, then a scope you can hold us to
Half an hour about where the week goes. If we do not think we can help, we say so on the call. If we can, you get one page with what we will do, what it costs, what we will measure, and exactly which of your data we would touch.
- Week two
The week mapped, and the easy wins taken
Every repeating job written down with a time against it. Some get deleted on the spot, because the cheapest automation is the job you stop doing. The baseline is recorded in the same week, before anything moves.
- Weeks three + four
Built, connected, and the rules written
The automations built in your own accounts. Your systems connected so the same information stops being typed twice. The plain-English AI rules written and agreed with you, before anyone starts pasting things into chatbots.
- Week five
Training, on live work
We sit with the people who will run this, on real jobs, until it sticks. If somebody cannot do it without us at the end of the week, we have not finished, and that is our problem rather than theirs.
- Day 90
The comparison, including what did not move
The same jobs timed the same way. Where something did not save what we thought it would, you hear it from us first, with what we would do about it.
from AU$2,490
One off, not a retainer. No lock-in, no percentage of anything you save, and no long contract. The final figure depends on how many systems have to be introduced to each other and how many people need training, and you see it in writing before you commit to a dollar.
Staying close afterwards is optional, from AU$149 a month, and you can stop it any time. If we have done this properly you should want to, because the point was to hand it over rather than to become part of your monthly costs.
What the AU$2,490 covers
Spelt out, so the word “from” is not doing any hiding.
- The mapping week, written up with a time against every job
- Up to three repetitive jobs automated in your own accounts
- Two systems connected so information stops being retyped
- The plain-English AI rules, written and agreed
- Training on live work, with hours booked against it
- The baseline recorded, then measured again at 90 days
More jobs, more connections, or training a larger team cost more, and they get priced before you commit rather than turning up later on an invoice.
How you will know whether it worked.
Written down before we start, measured the same way at 90 days. Notice what is not on this list: productivity, efficiency, and transformation. None of those can be measured in a business of eight people, so we do not pretend to measure them.
- Hours on the named jobs
- Timed at the start on the specific jobs we agreed to attack, and timed again the same way. Not "productivity", which nobody can measure. The actual jobs.
- How long an invoice takes to get paid
- From issue to money in the account. This one moves fastest and it is the one you feel, because it is cash rather than time.
- How often the same thing gets typed twice
- Counted during the mapping week. It is always higher than the owner expects, and it is the clearest sign of two systems that have never met.
- Whether your team can run it without us
- Checked by asking somebody to do it while we watch and say nothing. If they cannot, the training was not finished, whatever the calendar says.
- What we will not promise
- A headcount saving, a percentage productivity gain, or a revenue figure. Those numbers are unmeasurable in a business this size and anybody quoting them is guessing.
- The same information gets typed into more than one system every week
- Somebody spends their evenings or their Sunday on paperwork
- Invoices go out late, or get paid late, because chasing them is nobody’s actual job
- You have people who would use this well if somebody showed them properly
- You want somebody to lodge your BAS or give you tax advice. That is a registered BAS agent or your accountant, and it is a legal line rather than a preference
- You are hoping to reduce headcount. Say so early and we will tell you we are not the right people
- Nobody in the business has any time at all this quarter. The mapping week needs two hours of somebody who knows the work
- You want a custom system built from scratch. Almost nobody this size needs one, and we would rather connect what you have
The questions people ask before the first call.
If yours is not here, ask it on the call. We would rather answer it than have you guess.
Will this replace somebody’s job
Not the way we set it up, and if that is the goal we are the wrong people. What comes back is the repetitive half of a week: the retyping, the chasing, the formatting, the same question answered again. That time goes back to customers and to the work that needs a person. If you want to cut headcount, say so on the first call and we will tell you honestly that we are not the right fit.
Do I need to change accounting software
Almost never, and we would push back hard if somebody suggested it as step one. Migrating accounting software is expensive, disruptive and rarely the actual problem. The problem is usually that the software you have is not connected to anything else you use.
Can you do my BAS
No, and neither can anybody who is not a registered BAS agent. That is a legal line rather than a preference. What we can do is make the information that goes into your BAS arrive accurately and on time, so whoever does lodge it is not reconstructing a quarter from a shoebox. There is a section above on exactly where that line sits.
Is it safe to put my business information into these tools
It depends entirely on the tool and the setting, which is why writing that down is part of the work rather than an afterthought. Business-grade accounts configured so your data is not used to train anybody’s models, written authorisation for anything we touch, and one page of rules your team can actually follow. If we cannot answer where a piece of data goes, it does not go there.
We tried ChatGPT and it was not much use
That is the most common experience and it is not your fault. Generic AI gives generic answers because it knows nothing about how your business works. The largest study of why these projects fail put the cause as brittle workflows and misalignment with day-to-day operations rather than the technology itself. Fit is the work.
How much of my time does this take
The mapping week is the demanding one, and it is roughly two hours with whoever does the admin. Training is about half a day spread across the people who will use it. Everything else happens without you.
What if we are already busy and behind
Then say so, because it changes the order. We would start with the single job eating the most hours, get that off your plate in week two, and do the rest once you can breathe. A five-week plan that assumes a quiet month is no use to anybody.
Start with the job that eats the most hours.
Half an hour about where your week goes. We will tell you which jobs are worth automating, which ones you should simply stop doing, and which ones nobody should touch. If the honest answer is that you do not need us, that is what you will hear.