Tax Time, Without the Weekend of Receipt Hunting

How we can help with your tax return

That's going to depend on which situation you're in. If your income is one salary with a handful of deductions, and your accounts have nothing unusual, the ATO already has most of that information prefilled for you in myTax, and you can find those transactions by downloading a list of your transactions for the past year from your bank. An app in the middle wouldn't add a lot of value.

It's a different story if you're running work and personal spending through the same account, or several accounts. For example:

• a tradie buying tools, fuel, and materials
• a contractor with software subscriptions, a home office, and a car
• someone with a rental property, a side business, or investments alongside a regular job

They will have deductions that are real and worth claiming, buried under hundreds of thousands of transactions and mixed in with the groceries and the Friday night pizza, plus the odd occasion where a transaction goes through the wrong account. In this situation there are a lot of transactions to sort through, and Where Does My Money Go can really help.

At tax time the hardest part is gathering all of the information and not missing anything. If you have a lot of transactions, it's really hard to remember every single one of those individual transactions and decide what you should and shouldn't be claiming for.

A much easier way of doing it is to simply go through all of the transactions and put them all into a cash flow table. That way, every single transaction gets a decision: either it is tax-deductible or it's not tax-deductible. If it is tax-deductible, you're going to talk to your accountant about it. If it's not tax-deductible, like Tuesday's groceries or a Friday night out, then you know that, and that's going to be easily distinguishable.

What a tax return actually is

For most employees, income tax is withheld from every pay and sent to the ATO before the money lands. Your tax return is your yearly reconciliation between how much tax was paid and how much tax should have been paid. Obviously, if you've underpaid, you've got to pay. If you've overpaid, you get a refund, so it really is in everybody's interests to make that number as accurate as possible.

Because the tax deducted at source is usually based just on your income, without necessarily taking all your deductions into account, it is often the case that an accurate tax return results in a refund.

To make your tax return as accurate as possible, you need to find all of the potential tax deductions that you have. You need to check with an accountant who is very familiar with the tax laws in your situation so they can walk you through what you can and can't claim for. That way, you'll have a highly accurate tax return that's done lawfully and correctly.

What can you actually claim on tax?

An expense is deductible when it meets the ATO's three golden rules: you spent the money yourself and were not reimbursed, the expense directly relates to earning your income, and you have a record to prove it. The ATO's list is the authoritative starting point, grouped by the kind of expense: vehicle and travel, tools and equipment, working from home, clothing and laundry, self education, and union and professional fees.

What actually counts depends on your work and your situation. A tradie's boots, sunscreen and power tools. A contractor's home office, laptop and software subscriptions. A rental owner's loan interest, repairs and property management fees. The edge cases, and the split between work and private use, are exactly what your accountant is for.

What this app does is make sure that when you sit down with that list, or with your accountant, every transaction it might apply to is already in front of you with its receipt attached, instead of half remembered.

If claiming everything you are legally entitled to still feels a bit greedy, it should not, and paying the right amount is not the same as paying the maximum.

Receipts are required for proof of purchase and proof of GST

Keeping receipts matters more still if your business is registered for GST. Once turnover reaches $75,000, or you choose to register earlier, you charge GST on your sales and claim back the GST on your business purchases through your BAS. For a purchase over $82.50 you need a valid tax invoice to claim the credit.

When you scan a receipt into Where Does My Money Go, it automatically pulls out the GST amount for you. On the cash flow table, you can toggle between the GST amount, the gross amount (which is both GST and non-GST), and the net amount (which is just the amount without GST). If a receipt is attached to a particular transaction, you can see the GST amount. If you're also scanning your invoices as receipts, then Where Does My Money Go can automatically match your receipts and invoices to your transactions and show you where you've paid GST and where you have received GST.

For income tax deductions, the rule is a yearly total, not a single purchase. Once your work related claims for the year (not counting car, travel allowance and meal allowance claims, which have their own rules) add up to more than $300, the ATO can ask for written evidence for the whole claim: a receipt or invoice showing the supplier, the amount, the date, and what it was for. Stay under $300 for the year and you can get away with less, but you still have to show you spent the money and how you worked out the amount, and you need to keep the records for five years from when you lodge.

How much can you claim on tax without receipts?

The ATO lets you claim up to $300 of work related expenses for the year without written evidence. It is not a free $300: you still have to show the expense was work related and how you worked out the amount, and a few things have their own method and their own records, like the 70 cents an hour fixed rate for working from home (which needs a log of your hours), or the cents per kilometre method for a car (88 cents a kilometre for the 2025-26 return, 91 cents for 2026-27, up to 5,000 business kilometres).

The catch is that the $300 is a single yearly cap across all your small claims added together. One legitimate $400 purchase takes you over it, and once you are over, the ATO can ask for written evidence for the whole claim, not just the part above $300.

So "without receipts" is a low ceiling to build a year around. The better move is to make keeping them cost nothing: photograph a receipt when you get it and the receipt scanner reads it and files it against the matching transaction, so the $300 question never really comes up.

Here is the path through it, using the parts of the app in the order you would actually use them.

1. Export a transaction file from your bank and upload them, and supported formats are read automatically while an AI loader handles anything it doesn't recognise.
2. The app walks you through your most frequent uncategorised transactions one at a time, and each answer you give becomes a rule that sorts every matching transaction from then on.
3. The cash flow table lays the sorted transactions out by category and by month, with each income source and its expenses in their own row.
4. Expand a category and every transaction shows whether a receipt is attached, so the claims still missing evidence are the ones without.
5. Upload receipts, PDFs, photos or screenshots and the receipt scanner reads each one and matches it to the outgoing transaction.
6. Screenshots with several purchases, bills paid late and mismatched merchant names are all handled, with the amount and closest date doing the matching and the merchant text keeping it honest.
7. For a business, the scanner captures the total, tax and net amount on each receipt, and the table's Net and Tax views give you a clear record of the GST you've paid.
8. Accountant access lets your accountant see your categorised cash flow and receipts directly, with you controlling exactly what they can see.

What is left is the part only you can do

With the year sorted and the evidence attached, the decisions are quick:

• Definitely personal? Leave it alone.
• Definitely work or investment related? It is already in the claim pile with its receipt.
• Not sure? That is the conversation with your accountant, and now you have the transaction and the receipt in one place instead of a vague memory of "something from May".

You spend your time deciding what to claim, not hunting for the paperwork that lets you claim it.

Not tax filing software

This does not lodge your return. It gets your records in order so that lodging it, or handing it to an accountant, is quick and complete. We are not financial or tax advisers.