Admin to finish before the summer shutdown

January and February are when plenty of small renewals land, usually while you are still half on holiday. A business name that lapses in the second week of January, or a domain that expires while you are at the beach, takes far longer to fix than it would have taken to renew in December.

None of the jobs below take long. Most are looking something up and writing a date down.

1. Find everything due in January and February: business name renewals, company review dates, domain and hosting renewals.
2. Put each of those dates in a calendar, with a reminder a week or two ahead.
3. Check the contact email on your ASIC records and your domain records, since that is where renewal notices and reminders go.
4. Check the card on file for any auto renewals and replace it if it has expired.
5. Back up your website before you close.
6. Check the details on your ABN and, for a company, the registered office address.
7. Set an out of office on email and voicemail.

Renewals before the break

Business names are registered for one or three years, and names registered at different times fall due at different times, so check each one. If a renewal lands over the break, get it done early. On our business names page you search the name in the renewal box, choose one or three years and pay. The ASIC renewal fee is included in our price.

A company's review date is usually the anniversary of its registration, so a company registered in January or February may have its annual statement arrive while the office is shut. You can pay the review through us before you go: search the company and pay, we pay the ASIC review fee for you, and we email the solvency resolution document for the directors to sign.

Domains and hosting get forgotten because they renew quietly in the background for years. When a .com.au domain lapses, the website and the email that runs on it can go offline together. We register and transfer .com.au, .au and .com names on our domains page, and if your domains and hosting are with us, you can manage them, renewals included, from your Registry dashboard.

The contact email decides if you ever see the reminder. If your records still show an address you stopped using, or a shared inbox nobody opens, the reminders go nowhere. Auto renewal has its own weak spot: cards expire, and a renewal charged to a dead card fails.

Your website over the break

Nobody is watching the website over Christmas. If a plugin update fails or the site is compromised, a recent backup of its files and database means you restore it in January instead of rebuilding it. Our web hosting runs on cPanel on Australian servers, with email included, and cPanel is where you make that backup. Download a copy and keep it somewhere separate too.

The out of office should say when you close, when you are back and who to call if something cannot wait.

If you are not sure what you have falling due, our team can check your business names, company review dates and domain renewals for you on 1300 070 000, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm Melbourne time.