The Compliance Calendar: Every Date an Australian SME Must Never Miss

After years of cleaning up compliance messes, I can report that almost none of them began with ignorance. Owners knew BAS existed, knew super had deadlines, knew awards changed. What failed was the calendar: the obligation landed in a flat-out fortnight, nobody owned it, and a known date quietly became a penalty. So here is the entire compliance year for a typical Australian SME, organised the way the year actually runs — followed by the system that makes missing a date structurally difficult. The dates are the commonly applying ones; agent lodgement programs and your specific circumstances can vary them, which your accountant should confirm once. It's the first artefact we build for every new client, because everything else assumes it exists.

The quarterly heartbeat

Activity statements anchor the rhythm: quarterly BAS generally due 28 October, 28 February, 28 April and 28 July (with extensions when lodging through a registered agent). Around them, PAYG instalments for income tax follow the same beats if you're in that system. This is the pulse everything else hangs off — four predictable crunch weeks a year that should never surprise anyone, and somehow always do in businesses without the system below.

A structural note for the new era: super is no longer on this quarterly list. Under payday super, contributions are due within seven business days of every payday — super has moved from a calendar obligation to an every-pay-run control, which means the check isn't a date in the diary but a standing verification that each pay event's contributions actually landed.

The annual fixed points

In rough year order:

• 14 July — Single Touch Payroll finalisation for the year just ended; employees' income statements go "tax ready."
• First full pay period on or after 1 July — new award rates from the Annual Wage Review apply (decided in June; payroll must be updated, not assumed).
• 28 July — final quarter super under any transitional arrangements, plus the June BAS; also the annual workers' comp wage declarations in most states land mid-year for premium calculation.
• 31 October — income tax return deadline if you self-lodge (agent programs extend well beyond; being on an agent's lodgement list by this date is what buys the extension).
• 31 March — the FBT year ends; the return and payment fall due in the following months. Logbooks, declarations and the entertainment register need to exist before this date, not after.
• 30 June — trust distribution resolutions (before year-end, in writing), stocktakes, and the general year-end close.
• Company-specific: the ASIC annual review lands on your company's registration anniversary — a different date for every company, paid within two months, and the classic "we moved office and never saw the notice" penalty. Keep ASIC addresses current; that's a compliance date wearing an admin disguise.
• Rolling: business name renewals, licence and registration renewals (industry-specific, often annual), insurance renewals, and domain names — not all "compliance" in the statutory sense, but identical in failure mode.

Payroll tax, for businesses over their state's threshold, adds a monthly lodgement rhythm plus an annual reconciliation (typically July) — state-specific dates, same principle.

The system: own, automate, verify

A list is not a system. Three moves convert it:

One owner per obligation. Not "the bookkeeper generally" — a name against each line, with a deputy for leave. Most missed deadlines in SMEs were everybody's job.

The calendar does the remembering. Every date above goes into the business calendar as a recurring event — set two weeks before the deadline (the reminder you need is for the preparation, not the due date), with the task and owner in the entry. Thirty minutes once, protected forever.

A quarterly verification pass. Four times a year, alongside the BAS, a ten-minute checklist: lodgements up to date? Super landing within the window every pay run? Registrations current? ASIC details correct? Anything new (a hire, a second state, crossing a payroll-tax threshold) that adds obligations? Compliance drift is silent; the verification pass is the smoke alarm.

The deeper point: compliance run this way costs a few hours a year and zero anxiety, because nothing is ever remembered under pressure. Run the other way — by memory and adrenaline — it costs penalties, interest, weekend scrambles and, worst of all, credibility with the regulators and banks who notice patterns. The difference between the two isn't knowledge or diligence. It's a calendar, a name, and a checklist — which is the most encouraging finding in all of compliance: the fix is genuinely this boring.

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