Legal and Accounting Topics covered in Advice Plans

A legal and accounting advice plan is a fixed monthly subscription that gives you unlimited consultations with both a lawyer and an accountant, so you can get business advice when a question comes up instead of paying by the hour. With Lawpath, that means unlimited calls, live chat for quick questions, and contract reviews across legal, tax and compliance, all under one plan.

Here’s the part most people don’t realise until they’re stuck: the questions that actually keep founders up at night rarely sit neatly on one side. “Should I move from sole trader to a company?” is a legal question and a tax question at the same time. Most law firms won’t touch the tax. Most accountants won’t touch the legal. You end up paying two advisers to answer one question.

How a legal and accounting advice plan actually works

The model is simple. You pay a set monthly fee and get unlimited 30-minute consultations with a commercial lawyer and, on the accounting side, with an accountant. Between calls you can fire off quick questions over live chat and upload contracts for review. If something needs hands-on drafting beyond the consult, you get a discounted fixed-price quote first, so there’s no surprise bill at the end.

Most people book their first call within a day or two of signing up. You don’t need a polished agenda. The job of that first consult is often to work out which questions matter right now and which can wait, the way a business health check would.

Both advisers sit on one plan for a reason that isn’t marketing. In practice, the same question keeps landing in two places at once. A lawyer setting up your company structure will tell you the legal mechanics, then say “check the capital gains tax timing with your accountant.” With a combined legal and accounting advice plan, that handoff happens inside the same subscription instead of across two firms and two invoices.

The legal topics you can get advice on

Pretty much any commercial legal matter is fair game: structure, contracts, employment, IP, leasing, disputes and compliance. Below are the areas that come up most, and the things our lawyers wish people asked about earlier.

Company structure, trusts and restructuring

This is the single most common reason people book a consult. Should you stay a sole trader, register a company, add a trust, or some combination? A company is a separate legal entity, so it ring-fences business liabilities from you personally. A trust can hold the shares and distribute income flexibly.

Here’s the trap we see most. Founders rush to bolt a family trust on top of a company once they hear it’s “tax-effective.” But if you transfer your company shares into a trust later, that’s a capital gains tax event. The fix is boring and free: if a trust is going to own the company, name the trust as shareholder from the moment you incorporate. Decide the end structure first, then build it once.

One more thing worth a five-minute call. If you use a trust, use a corporate trustee rather than acting as trustee personally. It costs a little more to set up and keeps you off the hook for trustee liabilities. And don’t over-engineer it on day one. A common piece of advice is to defer the full trust-and-holding-company setup until the business is actually making money, because the compliance cost outweighs the benefit while you’re small. Need the mechanics? Our guide on how to set up a corporate trustee walks through it.

Becoming a director: check this before you say yes

Say a friend asks you to come on as a director of their company. It feels like a favour. It can be a serious risk. Under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), directors can be personally liable for unpaid tax, super and employee entitlements, and that liability can attach to amounts that built up before you were even appointed.

Resigning later doesn’t wipe the slate. Liabilities you picked up while you were a director can follow you out the door and can even spill over onto your other businesses. A short consult before you sign the consent to act is one of the highest-value calls you can make. The answer is sometimes “do the due diligence first,” and sometimes simply “don’t.”

Contracts and document reviews

Service agreements, client contracts, website terms, NDAs, supplier deals. You can talk through what a clause actually means, what’s missing, and what to push back on before you sign. Uploading a contract you’ve been sent for review is one of the most-used parts of an advice plan, because the value of a second read is highest before you’ve committed, not after.

A small but real example of what a quick call catches: when a company signs a contract, the right people need to sign it under section 127 of the Corporations Act, which removes later arguments about whether the signatory had authority. Get the execution block wrong and a clean deal can wobble months later. Ask us things like:

• Is this contract fair, and which clauses should I negotiate?
• What terms protect my business if the other side walks away?
• Do I need an NDA before these conversations, and who should sign it?

Employment and contractors

Hiring is where good intentions meet sham-contracting law. The thing founders get wrong: calling someone a contractor, handing them an employment or contractor agreement and assuming the label settles it. It doesn’t. A court looks at the actual relationship, including how much control you have and whether the work is ongoing, not the title on the document, the ABN, or how you pay them.

Two practical flags our lawyers raise often. Fixed-term contractor arrangements that run beyond two years start to look like employment, so shorter rolling terms are safer. And if you genuinely engage a contractor, the agreement should make clear they handle their own super, because the Superannuation Guarantee doesn’t apply when the relationship is a true contract for services. Common questions here:

• Employee or contractor: which one do I actually have?
• Which award covers my staff, and what am I obligated to pay?
• How do I exit someone without a costly dispute?

Intellectual property and trade marks

Your brand and your ideas are often the most valuable thing you own, and the easiest to lose by accident. You can use a consult to work out what’s worth protecting, whether to register a trade mark, and how to keep IP created by contractors or co-founders in the business.

Our IP consults show a clear pattern: people reach for a logo mark when a word mark gives broader, stronger protection, and they try to file overseas before locking in Australia. Get the Australian word mark sorted first. The other quiet risk is ownership. If a developer or agency built something for you without a written IP assignment, you may not own it, which becomes a real problem the day you raise money or sell.

Debt recovery and disputes

Chasing money you’re owed is stressful and easy to put off. A consult gives you the steps: when a letter of demand is the right first move, what to put in it, and when to escalate to a statutory demand or further action. Most disputes settle once the other side sees you’re organised and serious, so the paperwork does a lot of the work.

Startup, funding and capital raising

Bringing on a co-founder, issuing shares, running an ESOP, or taking money through a SAFE or convertible note. These are the moments where getting the order wrong is expensive. The recurring advice: sort the ownership terms and a shareholders agreement before you hand over equity, and use vesting so an early departure doesn’t leave a big chunk of your company with someone who’s gone. Decisions made cheaply at the start are the ones you don’t have to unwind later.

The accounting and tax topics you can get advice on

The accounting side of a legal and accounting advice plan covers the questions that decide how much tax you pay and whether the ATO comes knocking: GST, BAS, deductions, structuring, super and more. You get unlimited 30-minute calls with an accountant, plus discounted quotes for work like lodging returns.

Which type of accounting is required by law?

Australian law doesn’t force you to use one “type” of accounting, but it does require you to keep records that correctly explain your transactions and financial position. The ATO requires you to keep most business records for at least 5 years, and you can keep them digitally. If you operate through a company, the bar is higher: under the Corporations Act, companies must keep financial records for 7 years.

The real choice is cash versus accrual. Cash accounting records money when it actually moves; accrual records it when the invoice is raised. Most small businesses can choose, and below the GST turnover threshold you can report GST on a cash basis too, which helps cash flow because you don’t pay GST on an invoice before the customer pays you. See the ATO’s record-keeping rules for business for the detail.

GST and BAS

You must register for GST once your turnover hits $75,000 (or $150,000 for not-for-profits), and you can register earlier if it suits you. After that, you lodge a BAS and account for the GST you collect and the credits you claim.

There’s a point here that trips people up: you can’t claim GST credits on purchases made before you registered for GST, but those costs are still deductible for income tax. They’re two separate systems. And if a BAS is overdue, don’t go quiet. The ATO is far more flexible on a payment plan than people expect, and an accountant can often fold an overdue amount into an existing arrangement before penalties stack up.

Tax planning and deductions

What’s actually deductible, where the line sits between business and private expenses, and how to handle bigger items like a work vehicle or equipment. The win here is timing and substantiation. Keep proper tax invoices, not just order confirmations, and decide on deductions before 30 June rather than scrambling after. Bring your profit and loss to a call and you can get a realistic tax estimate instead of a nasty shock at lodgement.

Structuring for tax

This is where legal and accounting advice meet. The company tax rate for base-rate entities is 25%, which can beat the top personal rates a sole trader pays at higher income, but the timing of any switch matters. A common piece of advice: if your sole trader business is carrying losses, use them up before you incorporate, so you don’t strand a tax benefit.

Consultants, take note of personal services income (PSI). If most of your income comes from your own labour through a one-person company, PSI rules can push that income back to you personally regardless of the structure. The results test, the 80% rule and the unrelated-clients test decide it. Worth a call before you assume a company solves your tax.

Paying yourself as a director

Wages, director’s fees, dividends or drawings: each has different tax and super consequences, and the right mix depends on your numbers. This is a quick conversation that saves a lot of mess at tax time, especially if you’re new to running money through a company.

Super, payroll and STP

If you employ anyone, super is the cost you can’t negotiate. The Superannuation Guarantee rate is 12% of ordinary time earnings from 1 July 2025, the final step in the legislated increases. Pay it late and you’re liable for the super guarantee charge, which costs more than the super would have.

One big change is coming. From 1 July 2026, Payday Super replaces the quarterly system, and you’ll need to pay super with every pay run rather than each quarter. If you employ staff, that’s a cash-flow and payroll-setup conversation worth having before it lands. You can also get help with Single Touch Payroll reporting and getting your software set up properly.

Crypto and capital gains

Crypto is taxed, and the rules trip people up. You can get advice on how transactions are treated and what records you need, and Lawpath can lodge a crypto tax return for an additional fee. On the broader capital gains side, you can talk through when a CGT event is triggered and which concessions might reduce the bill, which matters most when you sell an asset or restructure.

What we see most in Lawpath consultations

Some patterns come up again and again across Lawpath legal and accounting consultations. None of them are obvious until someone’s already paid for getting them wrong.

• People build the structure twice. They set up a company, then try to slot a trust in later, and discover the share transfer triggers capital gains tax. Deciding the end structure first, then building it once, is the cheapest move in this whole list.
• The contractor label gets treated as a shield. It isn’t. The relationship in practice decides whether someone is an employee, and getting that wrong brings back-pay, super and penalties.
• Directorships get accepted as favours. The personal liability for tax, super and entitlements, including amounts from before you joined, surprises almost everyone who asks about it.
• The question crosses both desks more often than not. Restructures, IP licensing inside a group, and selling up all need a lawyer and an accountant in the same conversation. That’s the case for having both on one plan.

Frequently asked questions

What can I ask about on a legal and accounting advice plan?

Almost any commercial matter. On the legal side: business structure, contracts, employment, intellectual property, leasing, disputes and compliance. On the accounting side: GST, BAS, deductions, structuring, super and tax planning. If a question spans both, you can get the lawyer and the accountant working from the same brief.

How is this different from hiring a lawyer or accountant by the hour?

You pay a fixed monthly fee instead of an hourly rate, so you can ask the small questions without watching a clock. Traditional firms bill by the hour and usually specialise in either legal or accounting. A combined advice plan gives you both for one predictable price, with discounted fixed quotes for any larger work.

How quickly can I speak to someone?

Usually within 24 to 48 hours of signing up for your first consultation. For quick questions you don’t need to book at all, you can use live chat during business hours and get a response without scheduling ahead.

When do I have to register for GST?

Once your business turnover reaches $75,000 a year, or $150,000 for not-for-profits. You can register voluntarily before that. A quick call helps you weigh whether early registration suits you, especially if your customers are GST-registered businesses.

Should I be a sole trader, company or trust?

It depends on your liability, income and growth plans. A company limits personal liability and can be more tax-effective at higher income. A trust adds flexibility and asset protection but more compliance. The key is to decide the end structure before you build, because changing it later can trigger capital gains tax.

Is my contractor actually an employee?

Maybe, even if you both call it a contract. Courts look at the real relationship, including how much control you have and whether the work is ongoing, not the label or the ABN. If you’re unsure, get it checked before a dispute or an audit decides it for you.

What records does the law require me to keep?

Records that accurately explain your transactions and financial position. The ATO requires most business records to be kept for at least 5 years, and companies must keep financial records for 7 years under the Corporations Act. Digital records are fine, which is why cloud accounting software makes compliance easier.

What happens if my BAS is overdue?

Lodge and talk to the ATO sooner rather than later. The ATO is generally open to a payment plan, and an accountant can often add an overdue amount to an existing arrangement. The worst move is silence, because penalties and interest build while you wait.

Is the advice the same as a one-off lawyer or accountant?

You get advice from qualified lawyers and accountants in your consultations. For larger pieces of work, like drafting a complex agreement or lodging returns, you get a discounted fixed-price quote so you know the cost upfront before anything proceeds.

Start asking the questions you’ve been putting off

If your to-do list has a “sort out the legal and tax stuff” item that keeps sliding, you’re in good company. Almost every business owner feels behind on this, and almost none of them actually are. The trick is just to start asking the small questions early, while they’re still small.

That’s the whole point of a Legal & Accounting Advice Plan: a lawyer and an accountant on call, for one monthly fee, so the admin stops being the hardest part of running your business. Start your advice plan today and book your first consultation.