Starting the new financial year clean

Close the old year before opening the new one

The single most valuable July habit is drawing a hard line under last year. Lock the closed period in your accounting software so June figures can't shift once your accountant starts work, and note whatever the file's still waiting on, final adjusting journals usually. When those arrive, enter them promptly so opening balances match the lodged accounts. Everything you measure this year is only as reliable as the baseline it starts from.

Update payroll settings

The new financial year is when most payroll changes actually take effect. Award minimum wages get reviewed annually, and increases generally apply from the first full pay period in the new year, so check the awards covering your team and update pay templates before the first July pay run. Confirm your software's applied the current tax tables and that the super guarantee rate is correct; it currently sits at 12% of ordinary time earnings. Five minutes of checking now beats a year of back payments later.

The setup checklist

• Lock last financial year in your accounting software
• Check award rates and update employee pay templates from the first full pay period
• Confirm current tax tables and the 12% super guarantee rate are applied in payroll
• Load a budget for the new year into your accounting file so monthly reports show variance from day one
• Review your prices against last year's actual costs and margins
• Put every BAS, IAS, super and tax deadline for the year into your calendar now
• Review subscriptions, insurances and recurring costs before they auto-renew for another year
• Archive last year's documents into a clearly labelled year folder
• Tidy the chart of accounts: archive unused accounts, fix any coding workarounds you tolerated last year

Budget and pricing: the two decisions that compound

A budget doesn't need to be elaborate. Start from last year's actuals, adjust for known changes, wage increases, rent reviews, planned hires, and load it into your software. The point was never prediction accuracy. It's that every monthly report for the next twelve months now shows where reality diverged from plan, which is where managing a business actually starts, rather than just watching it happen to you.

Pricing deserves the same annual discipline. Costs moved last year whether or not your prices did. Reviewing margins once a year, at a predictable time, with a full year of data in front of you, beats reacting mid year when cash feels tight. Even businesses holding prices steady should make that a decision, not a default nobody actually chose.

Set the operating rhythm, not just the settings

Settings decay without a rhythm behind them. Decide now what happens weekly and monthly: bank reconciliation weekly, a monthly close with a short report review, a quarterly sit down before each BAS. Write it down, assign each task an owner, even if every owner is you. A year of small consistent closes is what makes next year's EOFY genuinely uneventful.

Where NextEra fits

Most of this checklist is simply what NextEra's managed monthly bookkeeping does as standard: locked periods, payroll kept current, deadlines managed, monthly reports run against budget. If the new financial year feels like the right moment to stop doing this alone, the Strategic Finance Review is the natural first step.