Before you start
Training comes first. Practise on a training copy of a demo business before entering a real business’s figures: mistakes there cost nothing. Why training comes first →
BusinessSolvency is a web-based platform — it runs in your browser and requires no software installation. It is accessible from any computer, tablet, or mobile device with an internet connection. Your data is stored securely and is accessible only to users you authorise.
The platform uses a hamburger menu — the three-line icon in the top right corner — to navigate between the main sections. Click it to see all available options, grouped by what they're for.
What quarterly tracking does and doesn't tell you
At minimum, a quarter needs just two numbers — Revenue and the Cash at Bank closing balance. Trade Debtors, Trade Creditors, short-term loans and ATO balances add real early warning when your export includes them. It is a pulse check between annual reports, not a replacement for one: it can tell you that cash has moved, but not always why. If Cash at Bank drops more than expected in a quarter, that alone doesn't show whether the cause is a debtor blowout, a margin squeeze, a one-off capital purchase, or something else. Treat an unexpected quarterly movement as a signal to look closer, with your accountant.
Not in the menu: Advance to the Next Financial Year is the orange “⚠ Advance to Next FY” button on the Forecast page. It moves the next forecast year into historical once real actuals are in, and is done by the accountant, or a person they authorise and supervise, with year-end authority (Section 7.8, Chapter 5).
Menu items vary by role and page
Not every item above shows up for every person, every time. Admin · User Management only appears for Administrators; the access list (Business Owners & Partners) only for business owners — accountants won't see it. An accountant sees the Import items only with data entry authority, and the year-end buttons (Advance to Next FY, Roll Forward and Clear FY) are greyed out unless you hold year-end authority (Chapter 5, Section 5.4). The exact Reports & Exports options can also differ slightly between the historical and forecast pages.
Either the accountant or an owner can create the business. If the accountant creates it, they start with data entry and year-end authority, then add the owners from the business’s menu (Business Access); the first owner they add becomes the business’s Admin (Chapter 5, Section 5.4). If an owner creates it, they add the accountant straight away, and the accountant checks the structure, tax and partners under Edit Details.
A client like one you know? On any business you can see, the demos included, the Accountant can press Set up a new client like this. The New Business form opens with that business’s structure, sector, tax rate and partners, and the new client gets its forecast assumptions for years 1, 2 and 3. No dollar figures, names or years are copied. (Chapter 3B, Section 3B.6)
Practise it
Accountants: practise setting up and reading a business on a training copy of a demo before your first client. Training: who training is for → · Chapter 3B: make your own training copy →
The main business screen displays the three financial statements side by side — Income Statement on the left, Balance Sheet in the centre, and Cash Flow Statement on the right. Year tabs at the top allow you to switch between financial years.
Reading the three-statement screen
Income Statement (left) — Enter your revenue, cost of goods sold, and all operating expenses including wages, rent, overheads, depreciation, and interest. Income tax and net income are calculated automatically from the figures you enter.
Balance Sheet (centre) — Enter your assets, liabilities, and equity as at the end of the financial year. Current assets, non-current assets, current liabilities, non-current liabilities, and equity are all shown in their standard accounting categories.
Cash Flow Statement (right) — Net Income, Depreciation, and the receivables/inventory/accounts payable movements are all calculated automatically from the Income Statement and Balance Sheet data you've already entered — nothing to type there. A separate group of lines is genuinely manual, though: Capital Expenditure, Long-term Investments, Divestitures, money put in (Capital Introduced, Partners’ Capital Introduced, Proceeds from Issue of Shares, or Levies, Grants & Appeals for a club), New Borrowings, Dividends, Owner Drawings, Debt Repayment, and the six Provision/Reserve Funding lines. See the field guide below for the full list.
Figures shown in green are positive and healthy. Figures shown in red indicate a negative or potentially concerning position — such as a net loss, negative working capital, or mounting ATO obligations. The platform uses colour consistently throughout to help business owners identify areas requiring attention at a glance. A light pink box with a red edge is kept for real warnings that need action now (Chapter 12.10, the colour rule).
Practise it
This is part of BusinessSolvency training. Try it on a training copy first, where mistakes cost nothing. Training: reading the three statements together →
BusinessSolvency works best with three years of financial data — the current year and the two prior years. This allows the platform to calculate year-on-year movements, identify trends, and produce the three-year solvency summary that business owners need for solvency reporting.
The data you need for each year comes from your business's annual financial statements — the same documents your accountant prepares for the ATO and for the annual review. If you use Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, Sage, or Reckon, Chapter 6 explains how to import this data directly rather than entering it manually.
Why some imports need one file per statement, and others don't
An Excel workbook can hold separate named tabs for Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow, so one Excel file can carry all three statements at once. A CSV file has no such structure — it's a single flat list with nothing to say which statement it is — so CSV imports are done one statement at a time. See Chapter 6, Section 6.5 for the full explanation and step-by-step process.
The Contingency Reserve Target is a suggestion, not an instruction
Months of Cover Target, the two Equity % fields, and Est. Annual Net Drawings Shortfall are settings, not instructions: they feed a suggested reserve target and an owners/trading split. On Auto, the Reserve Funding lines and the owners’ contribution line fill in from them; tick Manual on any of those lines to type your own figure instead. Nothing here claims to know what a business can afford — that's always your judgement call, informed by the business's real situation rather than a fixed formula.
Worked example: a Business Monthly Cost of $463,142, with Months of Cover Target set to 3, gives a Cashflow Reserve Target of $1,389,425 (simply three months of cost, to the nearest dollar). If the Cashflow Reserve balance carried in from last year sits at $895,030, that leaves a gap to target of $494,395 still to find this year. With Cashflow Reserve — Equity % set to 30%, the owners’ share of that gap is at most $148,319, with the remaining $346,077 from ordinary trading cashflow. The owners’ share is a ceiling, not a demand: the Cashflow Reserve Funding line auto-fills with the whole $494,395, and the Sustainability Equity Injection (Owner’s or Partners’ Sustainability Contribution for a sole trader or partnership; Members’ Reserve Contribution for a club) auto-fills only with the part the business’s own spare cash cannot cover, up to that ceiling. Money borrowed during the year, and income tax still owing to the ATO at year end, never count as spare cash. In this example (Bayside, FY2030, Chapter 8B) the company’s own cash covers the whole top-up, so the injection is $0. Both lines follow these rules unless Manual has been ticked on either — in which case the typed figure there is used instead, exactly as the previous paragraph describes. If you separately raise equity for another reason — funding an expansion, say — that goes in the ordinary money-put-in field above (Capital Introduced, Partners’ Capital Introduced or Proceeds from Issue of Shares), Manual-ticked; it adds together with whatever Sustainability Equity Injection suggests rather than the two being combined into one number.
Why reserves matter
The reserve target you set here is your business’s buffer for the unforeseen: a slow quarter, a late payer, a tax bill at the wrong time. It can’t be borrowed when the crunch comes, so it has to be built beforehand.
The Growth Disclosure is a reality check, not a recommendation
The Forecast Breakeven Report’s Sustainable Cashflow Growth Disclosure never changes Revenue anywhere in the platform. It is read-only diagnostic output for you to weigh up, the same principle as the Contingency Reserve suggestion above. For each forecast year it shows:
- Keeping pace. The year’s revenue growth on the year before, split into inflation and real growth, using the platform-wide inflation rate (or a Manual rate for that year).
- Step 1 — revenue growth rate to close the gap. How much would Revenue need to grow (or could it fall, if the business is already above breakeven) to reach cash breakeven? This assumes Cost of Goods Sold scales with Revenue and Wages and Overheads stay as planned.
- Cost stress test. Breakeven Revenue worked out again with Wages and Overheads running above plan by the Growth Assumption above, and whether the forecast revenue still covers it. Debtors and Creditors already grow automatically wherever Debtor Days and Creditor Days are set (see Chapter 11), so the test only needs to cover Wages and Overheads.
- Cost headroom. How far Wages and Overheads could rise before the year stops paying its way, and roughly how many years of inflation that is.
How to read the result
- Well above breakeven: Step 1 usually comes back negative. Read it as the margin of safety (how far Revenue could fall before breakeven), not a growth target. The cost headroom shows how many years of rising costs the surplus could absorb.
- Below breakeven, or only just above it: the cost headroom is small or none. A healthy Gross Margin can make Step 1’s growth look achievable — right up until the cost stress test shows that one more year of normal cost rises leaves the business short.
This is exactly the trap the Sustainable Cashflow Framework exists to catch: Revenue and profit can grow while cash quietly fails. Chapter 7, Section 7.9 explains the inflation rate, and Chapter 8B, Section 8B.10 works through it on Bayside’s figures.
Two different engines calculate the same three Cash Flow lines
On a historical year, Receivables, Inventory, and Accounts Payable movement are simply the change in the matching Balance Sheet balance from last year to this year — recalculated automatically every time the page loads, from whatever Debtors, Inventory, and Accounts Payable you've entered. There is currently no way to manually override this calculation on a historical year; whatever the Balance Sheet balances say is what these three lines will show.
On a forecast year, the same three lines work completely differently — they're driven by Debtor Days and Creditor Days instead (see Chapter 7 §7.8), not by a year-over-year balance change at all. Don't expect the two mechanisms to behave the same way when comparing a historical year to a forecast one.
Income Tax and Tax Provision are two separate figures
Income Tax, on the Income Statement, is fully calculated — Income Before Tax × your tax rate — and reduces Net Income automatically. Tax Provision, on the Balance Sheet, is a separate, manual figure representing how much of that tax is still owed to the ATO, not yet paid. The platform does not move any part of the calculated Income Tax figure into Tax Provision for you — you decide what belongs there, based on how much of the year's tax liability is genuinely still outstanding at year end. The same applies to ATO Obligations (Auto) just below it, which is simply the sum of your PAYG, Superannuation, and Tax Provision balances — it will show $0 until you've entered something into at least one of those three, even in a year with real Income Tax showing on the Income Statement.
A Provision balance and its Funding line answer different questions
The PAYG, Superannuation, and Tax Provision balances on the Balance Sheet answer "how much do we currently owe?" The matching Provision Funding line on the Cash Flow Statement answers a different question — "how much cash did we actually commit this year to cover it?" These are independent entries; typing one does not fill in the other. A business under cash pressure can recognise an obligation in the year it arises (the Balance Sheet provision) while leaving that year's Funding line at $0, then set the Funding line to match in a later year once cash is genuinely available. Both years are correct — they're recording different points in the same story. The same independence applies to the three Reserve balances and their Funding lines.
Why some fields won’t match your Xero or MYOB export
What these fields are for. PAYG Withholding Provision, Superannuation Provision, Tax Provision, Loan Repayment Reserve, Drawings Reserve and Cashflow Reserve are BusinessSolvency-specific fields. They track the things that create personal exposure for whoever owns the business, and show how much of the business’s cash is genuinely free to spend versus already earmarked for a known future need.
- Sole trader or partner: there’s no separate entity or notice mechanism. The ATO pursues you directly, and personal bankruptcy is the plain equivalent outcome.
- Incorporated company: PAYG, Superannuation and GST are the three categories an ATO Director Penalty Notice attaches to. See Chapter 2, Section 2.1 for why that split is incorporation, not business size.
- Income Tax (tracked by Tax Provision) isn’t a Director Penalty Notice category, but an unpaid balance is still the kind of mounting ATO debt that signals a slide toward insolvency.
Which fields import automatically
- Usually automatic: PAYG Withholding Payable and Superannuation Payable are standard default liability accounts in both Xero and MYOB, so the import recognises them directly.
- Usually typed in: Tax Provision, Loan Repayment Reserve, Drawings Reserve and Cashflow Reserve are picked up only if your chart of accounts uses exactly those names. None is a standard default account, so in practice these four are manual entries. Chapter 6, Section 6.8 lists every field and its recognised alternate names.
Where they appear
- Current Liabilities: PAYG Withholding Provision, Superannuation Provision and Tax Provision — real money owed to the ATO that hasn’t been paid yet.
- Current Assets, under “Reserved Cash”: Loan Repayment Reserve, Drawings Reserve and Cashflow Reserve — money set aside for a known future use, separate from the loan balance itself (under Short-term/Long-term Debt) and from drawings already taken (on the Cash Flow Statement).
Fields that carry forward automatically
A number of fields — the six above, plus Property, Equity Capital, Right-of-Use Assets, Debtor Days, and Creditor Days (see Chapter 11) — remember last year's figure automatically. If a figure genuinely hasn't changed from last year, simply leave the box as it is; the platform carries the prior year's figure forward for you. If it has changed, type the new number over it — that becomes this year's figure, and next year's box will default to that new number instead. Nothing is locked in until you save the year, so you can always change your mind before saving.
Practise it
Check which year you are on before you type or tick: one entry in the wrong year changes the whole picture. Training: working year by year →
BusinessSolvency is designed on a fundamental principle: a business owner should never need accounting training to use the platform correctly. Wherever data can be calculated from information already entered, it is calculated automatically. The business owner's job is to enter the source figures — not to understand the accounting mechanics behind the analysis.
- Gross Income
- EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Tax)
- Income Before Tax
- Income Tax provision
- Net Income
- ATO Obligations (balance sheet)
- Total Current Assets
- Total Non-Current Assets
- Total Assets
- Total Current Liabilities
- Total Liabilities
- Shareholders Equity
- Working Capital
- Cash Flow — Depreciation
- Cash Flow — Receivables movement
- Cash Flow — Inventory movement
- Cash Flow — Accounts Payable movement
- Cash Flow — Beginning Cash (chained from prior year)
- Net Operating Cash Flow
- Change in Cash
- Ending Cash Balance
- All solvency ratios and indices
- Revenue / Sales
- Cost of Goods Sold
- Wages & Payroll
- Superannuation
- Rent & Occupancy
- Operating overheads
- Depreciation
- Interest Expense
- Cash & Equivalents
- Debtors / Receivables
- Inventory / Stock
- Plant & Equipment
- Accumulated Depreciation
- Accounts Payable
- Short and Long-term Debt
- Equity and Retained Earnings
- Capital Expenditure
- Debt Repayments
- Dividends / Drawings
- PAYG, Superannuation and Tax Provisions
- Loan Repayment, Drawings and Cashflow Reserves
Cost of Goods Sold and Wages & Payroll each work a little differently
Wages & Payroll is always the full amount actually paid to staff for the year — type that figure directly, and it never changes. A separate "to COGS %" box next to it lets you say what portion of that total belongs in Cost of Goods Sold rather than Overheads (for example, staff directly involved in producing or delivering the product, versus admin and management). This only changes how the total is split for display between the two lines — the total wages figure itself, EBIT, and cash flow are unaffected either way.
Cost of Goods Sold has two modes, switched by a "Manual" tickbox. By default (Auto), you type a Gross Margin % you know is roughly right for the business, and BusinessSolvency calculates the dollar figure for you — Revenue × (1 − GM% ÷ 100). If you have the exact COGS dollar figure from the accounts instead, tick Manual and type it directly; untick it and COGS goes back to being GM%-driven. Whichever portion of Wages has been allocated "to COGS" is added on top automatically — unless COGS itself is in Manual mode, in which case nothing is added automatically, on the assumption you're already accounting for it yourself.
Revenue Growth % works the same way, for Revenue itself
Revenue is the single most consequential figure on the platform — every other line, in all three statements, ultimately depends on it — so for a long time it was also the one major figure with no Auto option at all: a plain typed dollar figure, year after year, with no way to project it forward from a growth assumption. Revenue Growth % (forecast years only) closes that gap, using the identical "Manual" tickbox pattern as Cost of Goods Sold above.
By default, the Manual tickbox is unticked and Growth % sits at 0 — on every existing business, and on any fresh forecast year, this behaves exactly like a plain typed Revenue figure always has. Type a growth rate (for example, 8 for 8%) with Manual left unticked, and that year's Revenue is instead calculated automatically as last year's actual Revenue × (1 + Growth % ÷ 100) — chained from the real prior year, historical or forecast, the same way Beginning Cash chains forward. Tick Manual at any time to override with a typed figure for that specific year, regardless of what Growth % is set to; untick it again and Revenue goes back to being Growth%-driven.
Because Cost of Goods Sold is already Revenue-driven when set to Gross Margin %, and Wages already has a "to COGS %" split, a single Revenue Growth % assumption on Auto will typically move the whole cost cascade with it — useful for a business owner quickly testing "what if Revenue grows at X% next year" without having to retype every downstream line by hand.
Interest and loan repayments work the same way
Loans are where a forecast most often goes wrong, because interest rates move and repayments get missed. On the Forecast page, Interest Expense and Debt Repayment can each be typed in dollars, as before, or worked out for you.
Interest Rate %: type a rate and the interest is the rate × the year’s average loans (start and end of the year). When rates change, change the rate, not the dollars. Years left: type the years left on the loans and the repayment is the loans at the start of the year ÷ the years left; typing it in one year fills later years with one year less, and any year can be changed, for example after a refinance.
When a repayment is missed. Tick Manual beside Debt Repayment and type what is actually paid, even $0. The loans stay higher, so the interest rises and next year’s repayment is bigger to catch up. Both flow through to cash, the Breakeven and the verdict. Repayments already missed in past years, or extra borrowing, are in the actual loan balances, so the first forecast year picks them up automatically. This is the conversation an owner and their accountant could have before the bank does.
The Equity check — a quick test that the figures hang together
Beside the orange Clear FY button on the Data Entry and Forecast pages is a small Equity button. Green “Equity OK” means this year’s Total Equity follows from last year’s, plus profit, less drawings and dividends, plus money put in (for a club: plus the surplus or deficit and any levies, grants and appeals). Amber “Equity out $X” means it doesn’t — usually a figure typed in the wrong place, or an opening balance that doesn’t match last year’s close. Tap it to see the figures under that year’s Balance Sheet. It is grey for the first year, which has nothing to compare with.
Your data is saved to the BusinessSolvency database each time you click Save All Data. It is good practice to save regularly as you enter figures — particularly after completing each financial year's data entry.
A note on data accuracy
BusinessSolvency produces analysis that is only as accurate as the data entered. The platform does not connect directly to your accounting system — it relies on the figures you or your accountant provide. Where possible, enter figures directly from your accountant's financial statements rather than from management reports, which may use different classifications or rounding.
If you notice that the ending cash balance on the Cash Flow Statement does not match the cash figure on the Balance Sheet, this usually indicates that the investing or financing figures — Capital Expenditure, Debt Repayment, and Dividends — need adjustment. Your accountant can help identify the correct figures from the source financial statements.
Chapter 6 explains how to import data directly from Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, Sage, or Reckon — which eliminates manual entry entirely for the fields covered by the import and ensures the figures match your accounting system exactly.
Practise it
Press Save All Data before you read, print or leave a page. If something slips through and gets saved by mistake on a training copy, that’s fine: untick it and save again. Training: saving and checking →
Sometimes your business can’t pay its tax bill when it falls due. The owner can ask the ATO for a payment plan: the tax is paid off over the next year or two, and the ATO adds interest, called the general interest charge (GIC), until it is paid. On the Forecast page you can test this before it happens, so the decision is made with the figures in front of you.
A story: Hero Coffee Van. In FY2029 the van’s tax due that year, $4,222, is not paid on time. At first it looks like good news: cash at the end of FY2029 rises from $3,938 to $8,160. But that extra cash is not the van’s to spend. It is owed to the ATO, and the Balance Sheet now shows an ATO debt of $4,222. The ATO charges interest on it: with a GIC rate of 11.51% (an example: the ATO sets the rate every quarter), that is $243 in FY2029 and $364 in FY2030. The interest can’t be claimed as a tax deduction, so it comes straight off the profit. Over the two-year plan, $2,111 is repaid in FY2030, and $2,111 is still owed at the end of that year. The cash looks healthier for two years, while the van quietly pays more for the same tax.
| Hero Coffee Van | FY2029 | FY2030 |
|---|---|---|
| Tax not paid on time | $4,222 | $0 |
| Repaid to the ATO (2-year plan) | $0 | $2,111 |
| ATO interest (GIC, not tax deductible) | $243 | $364 |
| ATO debt at the end of the year | $4,222 | $2,111 |
| Cash at the end of the year | $8,160 (was $3,938) | $9,834 (was $8,087) |
Where to find it. On the Forecast page, a yellow READ FIRST box explains the payment plan, and four rows shaded yellow with an ATO tag let you test it:
Press Save All Data, then open the Solvency Forecast: a red warning explains what the plan means for your business.
Watch out: an ATO debt is not spare cash. Not paying the tax keeps money in the bank for now, but it turns into a debt, with interest, that makes the next years harder. Talk to your accountant first, and contact the ATO before the tax is due, not after: a plan arranged early is always better than one arranged after the debt has grown.
Reserves are what keep the tax paid on time in the first place (Chapter 7, Section 7.5; Building Reserves). For a company, unpaid PAYG withholding, super and GST can also make the directors personally liable (Chapter 9, Section 9.6).
Checking the tax each year is step 11 of the July Year-End Checklist (Chapter 7, Section 7.12).
Practise it
Tell Hero’s story yourself: on a training copy of Hero Coffee Van, tick “Tax not paid on time” in FY2029 only, type a GIC Rate %, save, and read the Solvency Forecast. Chapter 3B: what to practise → · Training: the ATO and the cash →