Tracking ASIC annual review obligations alongside ATO deadlines
Fold company ASIC annual reviews into the same deadline view as your ATO lodgements so corporate compliance stops slipping through the cracks.
Most practice managers can recite their ATO calendar from memory. BAS quarters, IAS, income tax lodgement program dates, FBT, STP finalisation. What slips through the cracks is the quieter obligation sitting alongside it: the ASIC annual review. Each company you act for has a review date tied to its registration anniversary, an annual statement that lands shortly after, and a payment deadline two months out. Miss it and your client faces late fees that compound, and in stubborn cases the risk of deregistration. The problem is rarely that practices forget ASIC exists. It is that ASIC dates live in a separate system to ATO dates, so nobody sees the full corporate compliance picture in one place.
This guide walks through why those two streams drift apart, and how to bring company ASIC reviews into the same deadline view you already use for ATO lodgements.
Why ASIC reviews fall out of view
ATO obligations have a natural home in your workflow. They are tied to the lodgement program, they recur on familiar quarterly and annual cycles, and they are usually the reason a job exists in the first place. ASIC annual reviews behave differently. The review date is set by each company's date of registration, so a portfolio of fifty companies has fifty different anniversaries scattered across the financial year. There is no single program date to anchor to.
The annual statement and invoice arrive from ASIC on or shortly after the review date, the company has 28 days to confirm the details are correct, and the review fee must be paid within two months of the review date. None of that maps neatly onto July to June thinking. So the work gets tracked in a spreadsheet, in a registered agent portal, or worst of all in the memory of whoever looked after the company last year. When that person is on leave, or the client moves practices, the date is invisible until a late fee notice arrives.
The fix is not more reminders in more places. It is a single deadline view that treats an ASIC review with the same weight as a BAS.
One calendar for ATO and ASIC
Finye's compliance engine tracks Australian lodgement obligations and their due dates, including ASIC annual reviews alongside BAS, IAS, income tax returns and other ATO commitments. Rather than keeping corporate dates in a separate register, each company client carries its review obligation in the same place as its tax lodgements.
That matters for a simple reason. When a staff member opens a client and sees every upcoming obligation in one list, the ASIC review stops being a special case that only the partner remembers. It becomes another row with a due date, a status and an owner. The compliance dashboard rolls those obligations up across the whole client base so you can see what is due this week and this month without opening each file. A company with a review date in March surfaces in March, next to the March BAS, not buried in a tab nobody opens.
The per-client compliance view does the same job from the other direction. When you are working on a company's year-end, its ASIC review sits right there with its income tax and activity statement obligations, so you handle the corporate housekeeping while the file is already open instead of circling back later.
Turn each review into trackable work
Seeing a deadline is only half the job. The review still has to be actioned, and that means someone confirming company details with the client, dealing with any solvency resolution, and getting the fee paid on time. In Finye those steps become work items on a board, with a status workflow, an assignee, comments and attachments, plus checklists and subtasks for the specific tasks each review involves.
A typical ASIC review work item might carry a checklist along these lines:
- Confirm company details against the annual statement: registered office, principal place of business, officeholders and share structure.
- Raise any changes with the client and lodge the relevant ASIC form if details have changed.
- Record the solvency resolution where the company is not required to lodge financial statements.
- Confirm payment of the review fee before the two-month deadline and file the receipt.
Because these are normal work items, they appear on the same boards your team already lives in, in both kanban and list views. The review is no longer a side task tracked elsewhere. It is part of the queue, visible to whoever picks up the next job.
Make recurring reviews generate themselves
An ASIC review is the textbook recurring obligation. It happens once a year, on the same anniversary, for every company on the books. Re-creating that work by hand each year is exactly how dates get missed when staff change or the spreadsheet falls out of date.
Finye's recurring work handles this with templated jobs that auto-generate, the same mechanism practices use for quarterly BAS. Set the review job to recur on each company's anniversary and the work item appears on the board ahead of the due date, pre-populated with the checklist, without anyone needing to remember. Pair that with the client portal and you can collect detail confirmations directly from the client, who logs in to review their request and upload anything you have asked for, rather than chasing approvals over email.
Build the habit, then let it run
Folding ASIC reviews into your deadline view is mostly a one-time setup exercise. Record each company's review obligation so it appears in the compliance dashboard, template a recurring review job so the work generates itself, and give that job a clear checklist so any staff member can complete it consistently. After that, corporate compliance stops depending on one person's memory and starts running on the same rails as your ATO lodgements.
The payoff is a single place to answer the question every principal eventually asks: what is due, for whom, and who is on it, across both the ATO and ASIC. When the answer is one screen instead of three systems, late fees and deregistration scares quietly disappear.
If you want to see company reviews and ATO deadlines in one view, start a free trial of Finye or take a look at our plans to find the right fit for your practice.