Jobs & compliance
Track every compliance obligation from start to finish — BAS, tax returns, STP, payroll tax, and more.
What are jobs?
Jobs are individual work items tied to a specific entity, type, and period. Each job represents a single compliance obligation that needs to be completed by your practice.
Examples:
- Q1 2026 BAS for Smith Pty Ltd
- FY2025 Tax Return for John Smith
- Q3 2026 Payroll Tax for Henderson Group Pty Ltd
- FY2026 STP Finalisation for Williams & Co
Jobs track the full lifecycle of compliance work — from creation through to lodgement. Every status change, note, and staff assignment is recorded in the job's activity log, giving your practice a complete audit trail.
Job types
OneHQ supports the following job types, each with its own dedicated view and type-specific features:
| Job type | Description |
|---|---|
| Activity Statements | BAS / IAS — quarterly or monthly. Includes BAS estimate, Xero readiness, risk engine analysis, and payroll reconciliation. |
| Tax Returns | Annual income tax returns. Includes tax readiness checks with 5 traffic lights and prior year comparatives. |
| Payroll Tax | State-based payroll tax returns. Tracks gross wages, contractor payments, and interstate wages. |
| STP Finalisation | Single Touch Payroll year-end finalisation. Verifies employee totals and lodgement status. |
| WorkCover | Workers' compensation annual return. Tracks remuneration declarations by state. |
| FBT | Fringe Benefits Tax returns. Annual FBT year (April to March). |
| SMSF Annual Return | Self-managed superannuation fund annual compliance. Includes audit coordination. |
| Tax Planning | Group-level interactive planning worksheet. Pulls live Xero data for year-end tax estimates with distribution modelling. |
| Other Tasks | Catch-all for non-standard work items — advisory, special projects, one-off tasks. |
Each job type has its own list view accessible from the Jobs mode sidebar. Type-specific views surface relevant data and checks for that obligation.
Job statuses
Every job follows a workflow through a set of defined statuses. Each status change is automatically recorded in the job's activity log with a timestamp and the staff member who made the change.
Jobs can also be marked as Overdue when they pass their due date without being completed. The status is not strictly linear — you can move a job backwards if needed (for example, from Review back to In Progress).
Qx YYYY where the year is the FY-end year (the year in which June falls), not the calendar year of the quarter. For example, Q1 2026 means Jul–Sep 2025 (the first quarter of FY ending June 2026). Q1 and Q2 fall in the prior calendar year, while Q3 and Q4 fall in the FY-end calendar year.
Creating jobs
There are two ways to create jobs in OneHQ:
Manual creation
Click the Create Job button from any Jobs view to open the Create Job modal. You'll need to specify:
- Entity — which client entity the job is for
- Job type — Activity Statement, Tax Return, Payroll Tax, etc.
- Period — the relevant quarter or financial year (e.g. Q1 2026, FY2025)
- Due date — when the job needs to be completed
- Staff assignment — the preparer and reviewer for this job
Populate from obligations
When obligation types are configured on an entity (under the entity's Compliance tab), jobs can be populated automatically based on those obligations. This is the most efficient way to create jobs in bulk at the start of each period.
Jobs created from obligations auto-assign based on the entity's obligation preparer settings — the accountant or bookkeeper assigned to that obligation type on that entity will be set as the job's preparer automatically.
BAS job detail
The Activity Statement (BAS) detail view is the most feature-rich job view in OneHQ. It combines multiple data sources to give you a complete picture of BAS readiness before lodgement.
BAS estimate
OneHQ scans your last 3 years of historical BAS PDFs from Dropbox, extracts GST amounts from each, and computes a seasonal-adjusted, year-over-year trended estimate for the current period. This gives you an expected range before you even open Xero.
BAS readiness
When the entity is connected to Xero, the BAS detail view pulls live data including:
- GST analysis — current period GST collected vs paid, compared against the estimate
- Bank reconciliation — checks whether all bank accounts are reconciled for the BAS period
- Wages reconciliation — W1/W2 amounts from payroll, wages payable movements, per-employee breakdowns
Risk engine analysis
The risk engine runs 12 automated anomaly checks against the period's transactions, flagging unusual items with RED, AMBER, or INFO severity. See the Risk engine section below for details.
Three traffic lights
The BAS overview summarises readiness with three traffic lights — one for each major area (estimate accuracy, bank reconciliation, and transaction quality). Green means ready, amber means review needed, red means issues found.
Tax return job detail
The Tax Return detail view provides an annual readiness assessment with five traffic lights, each evaluating a different aspect of return preparation:
| Traffic light | What it checks |
|---|---|
| Financial data quality | Completeness and accuracy of the P&L and Balance Sheet from Xero. Checks for unusual balances and missing data. |
| BAS-to-return reconciliation | Verifies that BAS amounts lodged during the year tie back to the annual return figures. Flags discrepancies. |
| Super compliance | Checks pay run super contributions against the Superannuation Guarantee (SG) requirements. Flags shortfalls. |
| Prior year comparison | Compares current year figures to the prior year return. Highlights significant variances that may need explanation. |
| Outstanding items | Identifies items that need attention before lodgement — unreconciled transactions, missing documents, pending queries. |
Each traffic light is green (ready), amber (review recommended), or red (issues found). The Tax Return overview gives you a single-glance readiness assessment so you know exactly what needs attention before lodging.
Risk engine
The risk engine is a config-driven anomaly detector that automatically analyses BAS-period transactions from Xero. It runs 12 rules across three severity levels:
| Severity | Rules | What they detect |
|---|---|---|
| RED | R1 – R4 | High-risk anomalies — large unusual transactions, wrong-side entries on revenue/expense accounts, transactions significantly exceeding materiality thresholds, suspicious manual journals. |
| AMBER | A1 – A7 | Medium-risk items — moderate unusual amounts, balance sheet entries in unexpected accounts, transactions just above materiality floors, duplicate-looking entries, round-number patterns. |
| INFO | I1 | Informational findings — items worth noting but not necessarily problematic. Low materiality or common patterns that may warrant a quick review. |
Materiality thresholds
The risk engine uses tiered materiality that scales with the client's size. Thresholds are based on the entity's total GST activity, with an absolute floor of $50 and an amber ceiling of $250. Larger clients get proportionally higher thresholds, so a $500 transaction that flags for a small sole trader won't flag for a large company.
Configuration presets
Three presets are available under Settings > Practice Details:
- Fast — fewer checks, higher thresholds. Good for bulk review when you need to process many BAS jobs quickly.
- Standard — balanced analysis. Recommended for most practices.
- Conservative — thorough checks with lower materiality thresholds. Best for high-risk clients or when extra diligence is needed.
Acknowledging findings
Staff can acknowledge individual risk engine findings with a reason (e.g. "Reviewed — annual insurance payment" or "Client confirmed — one-off equipment purchase"). Acknowledged items are tracked per-rule, per-line, and affect the overall traffic light severity. This lets your team document their review without dismissing the findings entirely.
My Jobs
My Jobs is each staff member's personal job queue. It shows all jobs assigned to you as either preparer or reviewer, across all job types.
The view supports:
- Filtering — by job status (Not Started, In Progress, etc.) and by job type (BAS, Tax Return, etc.)
- Priority ordering — drag-and-drop priority sorting so you can arrange your queue by importance
- Due dates — colour-coded due date indicators (overdue in red, due soon in amber)
- Quick status updates — change job status directly from the list without opening the detail view
My Jobs is the default landing page when you enter Jobs mode, giving every team member an immediate view of their workload.
Frequently asked questions
Due dates are set when jobs are created, typically based on ATO lodgement deadlines for the relevant obligation and period. When creating a job manually, you set the due date yourself. When jobs are populated from obligation types, due dates are derived from the standard ATO due dates for that obligation.
Yes. Jobs can be reassigned from the job detail view. You can change both the preparer (the staff member doing the work) and the reviewer (the staff member reviewing it). Reassignments are recorded in the job's activity log.
The completion date is recorded and the job moves to the Complete status. Completed jobs remain visible in historical views and contribute to your practice's lodgement progress statistics on the dashboard. The job's full activity log is preserved for audit purposes.
OneHQ scans your last 3 years of BAS PDFs from Dropbox, extracts GST amounts from each document, and computes a seasonal-adjusted estimate with year-over-year trending. The estimate takes into account which quarter you're in (since many businesses have seasonal patterns) and applies growth/decline trends from recent history.
The estimate is stored on the job record and auto-triggered when the job is first created. It requires a Dropbox connection and historical BAS documents in the expected folder structure.
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