If you are changing, pausing, closing, selling or winding up a business, you should:
- Check whether your state or territory government has any special requirements.
- Check you have met all lodgment, reporting and payment obligations with any government agencies you have dealt with.
- Work with your tax adviser or an insolvency practitioner early on to minimise risk for your exit strategy or succession plan, and see what you need to do from a tax and super perspective, including:
- seeking advice from a registered professional, particularly if you may need to wind up your company
- being wary of advisers who encourage you to engage in inappropriate or even illegal activity, such as illegal phoenix activity.
- Check and update authorisations for your business in Relationship Authorisation ManagerExternal Link and permissions for your staff in Access Manager.
- Check whether you need to pay goods and services tax (GST) or capital gains tax (CGT) on business assets you sell and cancel your GST registration.
- Work out and pay final pay and entitlements to your employees.
- Lodge final returns and reports and pay final PAYG instalments, tax and loans.
- Finalise your Single Touch Payroll (STP) reporting for your employees.
- Keep business records of all transactions (including records related to selling or closing your business) for at least 5 years.
For more information:
- see Pausing or permanently closing your business. For a summary of this content in poster format, see Pausing or permanently closing your business (PDF, 216KB)This link will download a file.
- visit information on business.gov.au at ExitingExternal Link.
If you registered a business but haven’t started
If you have registered a business but didn't start the business, and have now decided that you will not operate, you must cancel your ABNExternal Link.
If you have started a business and have made a loss, you need to lodge a tax return before you cancel your ABN.
If you start running your business again, you'll need to apply for an ABN online at Australian Business RegisterExternal Link. In most cases if your business structure hasn’t changed, we’ll register you with the same ABN.