How to prepare receipts for your accountant (what they actually want)
Your accountant does not want your receipts. They want to know your deductible totals by category, they want to trust those numbers, and they want any individual receipt retrievable if a question comes up. Hand them a shoebox — physical or digital — and the first hour of their bill is them building that structure for you at their hourly rate.
What the handover should look like
The ideal package for an individual or sole-trader return is small:
- A category-by-category summary of the year's deductible spending — one page, with receipt counts and totals.
- A CSV of the underlying receipts — date, vendor, amount, GST, category — that they can sort and drill into.
- A short list of judgement calls you're flagging for their advice, rather than deciding yourself.
- The receipts themselves, retrievable on demand — not printed, not attached, just findable within a minute if they ask about a specific line.
That last point deserves emphasis: no accountant wants 400 PDFs emailed to them. They want to ask "what's this $612 at Bunnings in March?" and get an answer.
Before the handover: a one-hour pass
- Empty the uncategorised pile. Every uncategorised receipt is a question the accountant has to ask you at their rates. Ten minutes of assigning categories is the highest-paid work you'll do all year.
- Resolve duplicates. Double-counted receipts inflate totals, and an accountant who catches one starts (rightly) double-checking everything else. If one purchase produced two documents — a PayPal receipt plus the merchant invoice — link them as the same purchase so both are kept but only one counts.
- Flag the mixed-use items. Phone, internet, the laptop: tag them
splitand let the accountant set the business percentage. That's precisely the judgement they're paid for. - Check the big-ticket items. Anything over $300 may be depreciated rather than deducted outright. Make sure the receipt shows the date clearly — the accountant needs it for the depreciation schedule.
- Note what changed this year. New job, new home office, started an ABN, bought a car used for work: two sentences of context saves a discovery interview.
Answering "can I see the receipt for this?"
During preparation, expect three to ten of these queries. This is where a searchable archive pays for itself: search the vendor, open the receipt, send the original file — thirty seconds. The alternative timeline, where you go digging through last July's emails, is how returns end up lodged in October.
What it does to the bill
Accountants price on time and risk. Arriving with categorised totals, resolved duplicates and retrievable evidence cuts both: the mechanical work is already done, and the numbers are trustworthy enough that they can spend their hours on actual advice — the deduction you didn't know about, the timing decision, the structure question. Same fee gets you strategy instead of data entry; or the fee simply drops. Either way you win.
The export button at the end
In The Paper Keep this whole handover is the tax-year summary: deductible categories totalled per year (with foreign currency converted at ATO monthly rates), and an Export CSV button that produces exactly the spreadsheet described above. Categorise as receipts land during the year, and "preparing receipts for the accountant" stops being a July project and becomes a download.
This works even better inside The Paper Keep — start a 14-day free trial.
When you're ready to do this in The Paper Keep, these are the click-by-click pages.
Stop rebuilding your receipts at tax time.
This works even better inside The Paper Keep. Capture, parse and categorise everything as it lands — and have one tidy summary waiting for the accountant.