End of financial year checks for your business registrations

The end of the financial year on 30 June is when most business owners think about tax. The registrations the business runs on get far less attention, and they go out of date quietly. An old email address on a business name. A director who left two years ago and is still on the register. A credit card on a domain renewal that expired in March. None of it bites until a renewal notice goes missing or a customer looks you up and finds the wrong details.

This is about those registrations, not your tax. The return itself is one for your accountant.

Half an hour in June is enough to get through the lot.

1. Look up your ABN on ABN Lookup and check the entity name, the business location and your GST status.
2. Write down the renewal date of each business name you hold. Different names often fall due at different times of year.
3. For any company, note its review date (the anniversary of the day it was registered) and check the last review fee was paid.
4. Check the company's registered office address. If your accountant's office was the registered office and you have since changed accountants, it may be wrong.
5. Check the directors' details, residential addresses included. Directors who have left or moved house are a common gap.
6. Check when your domains and hosting are due to renew, whether auto renew is on, and whether the card on file has expired or been replaced.
7. Update the contact email ASIC holds for your business names and company, so reminders reach an inbox you read.
8. Save copies of registration certificates, renewal receipts and company review documents in one place with your other business records.

ABN Lookup is public. Customers and suppliers use it to see who they are dealing with, and some check your GST status before they pay an invoice that includes GST. You can search your own ABN on ABN Lookup in a few seconds.

Business name renewal notices go to the email on the registration, which is why items 2 and 7 belong together. If a name falls due soon, you can renew your business name with us before it expires without losing any time on the registration. Not sure when your names or company review are due? Our team can look them up for you on 1300 070 000, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm Melbourne time.

Companies do not renew. Each year on the review date ASIC issues an annual statement and the company pays the review fee, and that statement is the natural time to confirm the registered office, directors and shareholders are right. If you are setting up a new company for the new financial year, you can register a company with us.

Domains and hosting

These tick along without anyone thinking about them, right up until they stop. An expired card on an auto renewal is one of the most common reasons a website or business email goes dark.

Check the expiry date of each domain, turn auto renew on where you want it, and confirm the payment card is current. For a .com.au, the details behind it should still match your business, since eligibility is tied to your ABN or ACN. If your domains and hosting are with us, all of this is in your Registry dashboard: expiry dates, auto renew settings and renewals, side by side with your hosting. We register and transfer .com.au, .au and .com names on our domains page, and our hosting comes with cPanel and email on Australian servers, on quarterly or yearly plans. Moving a domain you hold elsewhere across to us puts it in the same dashboard, so next June there is one place to look.