Every year, May and June bring the same flood of tax tips. Most are generic, some are outdated and a few are genuinely wrong. For business owners with complex structures, the advice aimed at employees or sole traders simply does not apply. Acting on the wrong advice can cost more than doing nothing at all. This 30 June tax planning webinar, presented by James Carey, Partner and Chartered Tax Advisor at Prime Partners, cuts through the noise and focuses on what matters in order of impact: understanding your actual profit position, managing trust distributions and Division 7A, making the most of superannuation before the caps change and knowing what is genuinely urgent versus what can wait until July.
Start Here: Your Taxable Profit Position
Before any year-end strategy is worth considering, you need to know where you stand. Not your bank balance, not a rough estimate, but your actual taxable income across each entity in your structure.
Cash in the bank includes GST collected, loan proceeds and money owed to others, so it tells you nothing useful about your tax position. Accounting profit gets you closer, but it still includes non-deductible items and misses timing differences. Taxable income, adjusted for add-backs, deductions and depreciation, is the number that determines your marginal rate and which strategies are actually worth pursuing.
If you run a trading trust, an investment trust and a company, that is three separate profit positions to understand. Get March or April management accounts from your accountant or bookkeeper before you do anything else, because every decision covered in this webinar depends on that starting point. Our EOFY tax planning guide for business owners walks through how to map your position across entities in more detail.
Trust Distributions: The 30 June Deadline Is Real
For any discretionary trust that has made a profit in FY2026, a distribution resolution must be signed before 30 June. Not in early July when things are quieter, not when the accountant sends a reminder, but before 30 June. Missing it means the trustee is taxed at 47% including Medicare levy on income that could have been distributed to lower-rate beneficiaries.
This is the single most expensive compliance failure in Australian tax. It catches people every year, including experienced operators who know the rule but leave it too late.
A good resolution names specific beneficiaries with specific amounts or proportions, includes streaming elections for capital gains and franked dividends, and confirms that each beneficiary still exists and can receive the distribution. It also needs a Section 100A check: the beneficiary must genuinely receive and control the funds, not simply be named on paper while the money flows elsewhere. Getting this right requires planning with your accountant in April or May, not a rushed phone call on 28 June.
Division 7A: The Trap That Catches People Every Year
Division 7A applies when a private company makes a loan, payment or forgives a debt to a shareholder or their associate without a complying loan agreement in place. The ATO treats it as an unfranked dividend at the recipient’s marginal rate, with no franking credits to offset the liability.
The most common scenarios are simpler than people expect. A director draws money from the company during the year without documenting it as a salary or a formal loan. A trust distributes income to a company, the company does not actually receive the cash, and the unpaid present entitlement is never put under a complying loan agreement. A shareholder uses a company-owned asset, such as a car or a holiday property, for personal purposes without accounting for the benefit.
Before 30 June, check every company in your group for existing Div 7A loans and make the minimum yearly repayment. If you have taken money from a company this year, either repay it or put it under a complying loan agreement with benchmark interest. If a trust has distributed to a company without paying the cash, get a loan agreement in place. These issues are fixable now. After 30 June, most of them are not.
Superannuation: The Numbers And The Timing
The concessional cap for FY2026 is $30,000, covering employer SG contributions, salary sacrifice and personal deductible contributions. Every dollar contributed concessionally is taxed at 15% inside super instead of your marginal rate, which at 47% represents a 32 cent saving per dollar contributed.
If you have not maxed your concessional cap in the last five years and your total super balance is under $500,000, unused amounts carry forward. In some cases this means contributing up to $150,000 in a single year. You can check your available carry-forward balance by logging into myGov and navigating to the ATO super section.
Personal deductible contributions are the most flexible option for business owners and the self-employed: you pay from your own bank account and claim the deduction at tax time. The fund must receive the contribution by 30 June, which means transferring it by around 25 June to allow for processing time. You must also lodge a Notice of Intent with the fund before claiming the deduction on your return.
From 1 July 2026, employers are required to pay SG within seven days of each pay run under the new Payday Super rules. If you employ anyone, speak to your payroll provider before 1 July about whether your systems can handle same-cycle super payments.
What Else Is On The List?
Bad debts must be formally written off before 30 June to claim the deduction, with a board minute or director resolution as evidence. Making a mental note does not count.
Prepaid expenses can be pulled into this financial year if you are a small business with under $50 million turnover. Pay up to 12 months of rent, insurance, interest or subscriptions before 30 June and claim the full deduction now, but only for things you would pay regardless of the tax outcome. Our EOFY small business guide covers prepayments and other timing strategies in more detail.
The instant asset write-off threshold is expected to remain at $20,000. Assets must be installed and ready for use by 30 June to count in this financial year. Spending $20,000 to save $5,000 in tax is still spending $15,000 you did not plan to spend, so the purchase needs to make commercial sense on its own terms.
Restructures can wait. Setting up a new trust or company does not need to happen before 30 June, so plan it now and execute it in July.
If your business has been affected by recent fuel price increases, the ATO has also introduced payment plan support and instalment variation options worth reviewing before year-end.
The Test Worth Applying To Every Decision
Before acting on any year-end strategy, ask yourself one question: would you do this if there were no tax benefit? If the answer is yes, the strategy probably makes sense. If the answer is no, walk away. The ATO applies anti-avoidance provisions to arrangements that exist primarily for tax purposes, and the consequences of getting it wrong go well beyond losing the deduction.
Book A Year-End Planning Session
The webinar covers each of these areas in detail, with worked examples drawn from real client scenarios. If you have a multi-entity structure or a high-income year, the strategies worth pursuing are specific to your position, and the decisions worth making now depend on numbers that only you and your adviser have access to. For a broader overview of year-end planning across income types, our EOFY guide for individuals is a useful starting point.
To work through your 30 June position with the Prime Partners team, we are taking bookings for planning sessions now. Visit pp.tax or contact us at [email protected].