“Reviewing thousands of ledger lines for potential FBT issues used to be a major bottleneck. With Coco, those exposures are identified in seconds at the click of a button.”
The job nobody volunteers for
Ask an Australian accountant which job they dread. Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) wins comfortably.
The FBT year closes on 31 March and the returns fall due in June. That squeezes a full compliance cycle into 3 months, right when everyone is already stretched.
The work isn't hard. It's relentless. Chase the vehicle list. Chase the logbooks again. Work out who drove what, and for how long. Prefill the declarations, collect the signatures, then calculate each car both ways. Build the employer report so the client knows what to pay and what to journal. Now multiply that across a book of family business groups running 10 to 20 vehicles each.
We're a small business too, so we know what that kind of month does to a team. So we asked a simple question. What if the process ran itself and our accountants only handled the calls that need a human?
Step 1: a checklist that turns up already filled in
The old intake was a blank questionnaire, sent to an office manager who was already flat out. The new one arrives pre-filled.
Coco builds a checklist for each entity from the prior year and the client's ledger. The client confirms and corrects, rather than compiling from scratch. It opens with screening questions across the benefit categories we need to rule in or out:
- Motor vehicles, expense payments, and loans
- Debt waiver, entertainment, and housing
- Board, car parking, LAFHA (living-away-from-home allowance), airline transport, and property
Then it drops into the detail. Schedule A alone runs close to 100 fields per vehicle, from engine type and finance arrangement through to odometer readings, days unavailable for private use, post-tax employee contributions, logbook percentage, and running costs. Employee declarations are prefilled from the same data and issued for signing. Anything missing is raised as a tracked query, not quietly assumed.
Step 2: a workpaper that flags its own weak spots
The completed checklist goes to the workpaper agent. What comes back is a live-formula workbook, not a static answer.
Each car is calculated on the statutory formula and, where there's a logbook, on the operating cost method. The lower value carries through as the taxable value, and the saving from the logbook sits on its own line. Loan benefits are calculated on the daily balance method at the benchmark rate. Because the cells are formulas, a logbook that turns up late doesn't mean rebuilding the file.
The part our reviewers value most? It colour-codes its own uncertainty:
- Green has a logbook
- Grey is an exempt commercial vehicle
- Amber needs a human decision
It also hands back its own review list. On a recent job that came to 6 items, spanning a commercial vehicle exemption that needed the load capacity confirmed before we relied on it, an ambiguous model variant, incomplete odometer data, a low emissions vehicle exemption condition, and a loan dated outside the FBT year. Each item came back with the legislation and ATO (Australian Taxation Office) guidance attached. Our accountant checks a position instead of researching from a blank page.
What else changed
We retired the FBT calculation tool we used to pay for. The workflow sits in-house now, so we can adjust it on the fly for a situation the software would never have handled. The FBT team works from one baseline. The return, employer report, employee benefit report, and journal report come out of the same pack. Roughly 355 hours came out of FBT preparation across the firm.
“We had highly skilled accountants that would be bogged down in hours of manual processing. It left them unable to add real value to our clients.”
Where the hours went
Each return still gets a full human review, and each amber flag still gets an accountant's decision. What changed is where the time goes.
Less time assembling vehicle schedules and chasing signatures. More time on classification calls, employee contribution planning, and the pre-purchase conversation that keeps next year's exposure down before it starts. The hours didn't quietly disappear into other compliance work either. They landed in June, the busiest month of our year.
“Time saved on the FBT program gave the team breathing room through June. It delivered a noticeably better client experience, and prompted one accounting director to call it the best June 30 EOFY in 17 years.”
