Built so your records can look an auditor in the eye.
Every decision logged. Every number traced. Every lodgement on clean data. This page explains, in plain terms, how we do it — and what that means for your records, your privacy, and your relationship with the ATO.
The best relationship with the ATO is a boring one.
When your records trace cleanly from the bank to the lodgement — every receipt attached, every decision logged, every category explained — audit probability drops and audit outcomes are uneventful. myaccountant is built so your records can look an auditor in the eye and have nothing to say.
This is not an adversarial stance. It is not "the ATO is the enemy and we will protect you." It is the opposite: a well-kept set of books is a well-kept set of books, and the ATO is a bureaucracy that prefers them. The boring relationship is available to anyone who keeps their records in a shape that supports it. Most platforms do not. We do.
What "traceable from source to submission" actually means.
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The source document is preserved.
Every receipt, statement, invoice and pay stub that enters the platform — by bank feed, by forwarded email, by upload — is kept as the original document, attached to the transaction it represents, for as long as you keep your account.
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Every decision is logged.
When a transaction is categorised, reconciled, or posted, the platform records what was decided and why — whether the decision was made by you, by your accountant, or by a Workflow. The log is permanent.
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Every number traces back.
From the total on your tax return, you can click through to the category it rolled up from, to the transactions it summed, to the source document each transaction came from. Three clicks from a lodged figure to the paper it started as.
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Every lodgement runs on clean data.
BAS, IAS and income tax returns are generated from the reconciled books, not from a separate data entry pass. What you lodge is what your books say.
The Workflows, and what their audit trail looks like.
Every Workflow produces a reviewable chain of custody. When the Property Workflow reads a manager's statement and posts transactions against your rental property, it keeps a record of four things: the source document, what it extracted, what it decided to do with each line, and why. The same pattern applies across every Workflow — Receipts, Property, Rideshare, Onboarding, and every one that ships after them.
You see this audit trail in the product. Every Workflow run opens a panel showing the original document on one side, the posted transactions on the other, and the agent's reasoning between them. If a number is ever questioned — by you, by your accountant, or by the ATO — the answer is three clicks away.
This is what separates our Workflows from the generative AI in most other accounting platforms. Most AI in accounting is a black box. Ours is a glass one — and the glass is not metaphorical. It is a product surface you can open.
Your data, your records, your decisions.
Your data lives on Australian servers, protected by encryption at rest and in transit, with two-factor authentication available on every account. We never sell it. We never use it to train external AI models. Your accountant sees what you grant them access to — nothing more. If you close your account, you can export everything first; then it is deleted.
- Hosted in Australia, by an Australian company. No cross-border data residency.
- Encryption at rest and in transit. Industry-standard AES-256 and TLS 1.3.
- Two-factor authentication available on every account.
- Full data export, in formats your next platform can read. No lock-in, ever.
Direct to the ATO. Direct to super. The regulator-approved pipes.
Lodgement to the ATO runs via Standard Business Reporting — the direct, authenticated path the ATO publishes and maintains for this purpose. Single Touch Payroll reports are submitted at the time of each pay run, compliant with STP Phase 2. Super contributions clear via Beam, the SuperStream-compliant clearing house maintained by the major super funds.
These are not integrations we built against unofficial APIs. They are the regulator-approved pipes, used the regulator-approved way. That matters when the ATO ever has a question about a lodgement: the answer sits in their own records, not in a reconstruction.