BAS Joys

Today I went through the quarterly tax ritual self-flagellation called the Business Activity Statement.

This is a lot of fun (not), but for the church it means claiming back all of our GST payments on things we've bought and this quarter it amounted to over $900 so filling in the BAS is a Good Thing.

I do the BAS on-line as you get the refund faster. However, the Australian Taxation Office thinks the world can be divided into two parts- people who use Windows and those who use paper. They do provide a linux implementation of their bodgy software, but it doesn't have any technical support. That's OK, since between us, Tim and I can usually work stuff out.

In the past, for some reason, I've been able to use Firefox to do the BAS but not Opera. When trying to log on in Opera I would get the message that it could not find the ATO software. So, as usual I started up Firefox, logged in and got the old familiar message about the software not being detected. I did the obvious thing of trying to hack the two-line script that it runs- but no success.

Then in a moment of despair, I tried it in Opera-- it worked :-D

Yay!!

So the BAS was done, submitted and delivered. Now we just have to wait for the refund to appear in the church bank account.

Of course, in the ways of Saint Murphy, I discovered an hour after all this was finished that I had inadvertently entered our new printer into the accounts twice- meaning that I've claimed about $300 more than I should have. I've corrected our records and it will all sort out in the next quarter. Just don't tell the ATO I made a mistake!

Blessings

Keith