Guides

Practical guides for running your practice on Cassandra Tax

Product-accurate walkthroughs written against the shipped workspace — no aspirational screenshots, no capabilities you cannot find in the app.

Getting started: from new account to first return

The shortest path from registration to a return in review — what to set up, in what order, and why.

1. Register the practice

Create the account with your practice details and Tax Agent Registration Number. The workspace keeps lodgement-authority prerequisites visible from day one — nothing transmits to the ATO without the readiness controls passing.

2. Add a client group and its entities

Clients are groups; entities (individuals, companies, trusts, partnerships, SMSFs) hang off them. TFNs and ABNs are encrypted at rest the moment they are saved, with hashed sidecars so search never needs decryption.

3. Create the first return

Pick the entity, return type and financial year in the return wizard. The editor opens with the official ATO form structure, auto-save, and field diagnostics; completion tracking shows what is left section by section.

4. Attach evidence as you go

Upload source documents against the return, connect a ledger (Xero, MYOB AccountRight, QuickBooks Online, or a spreadsheet import), and let workpapers accumulate on the same job record the reviewer will see.

5. Move it to review

Submit for review when preparation completes. Reviewer notes, tax-aware review hints, and sign-off state live on the return — the audit trail records every transition for seven years.

The return workflow: draft to lodgement-ready

How a return moves through the practice — states, roles, and the evidence each step leaves behind.

States a return passes through

Draft → in progress → ready for review → in review → approved → lodgement-ready. Rejections send the return back to in-progress with the reviewer's notes attached, so rework starts from specifics.

Who does what

Role-based permissions separate preparers, reviewers and partners. A return cannot approve itself: sign-off records who approved, when, and against which version of the data.

Signatures

Generate the declaration pack and collect signatures through the built-in signing flow or Zoho Sign. Completed envelopes are archived back into the document vault against the return, with tamper-evident seals.

Lodgement readiness

The ATO Services command center shows the readiness controls for your configuration — certificates, transport settings, and conformance status — before any interaction is attempted. External ATO approvals remain published with explicit boundaries in the Trust Center.

Running the BAS and IAS cycle

Quarterly and monthly activity statements alongside the annual return work, without a separate system.

The activity statement workspace

BAS and IAS fields follow the official activity statement structure — GST, PAYG withholding, PAYG instalments, and FBT instalments — with the same auto-save and diagnostics as annual returns.

Key dates on the deadlines board

The deadlines board tracks your returns with due dates and shows the standard ATO key-dates reference (BAS quarters, PAYG annual reporting, TFN declaration reporting) so the cycle stays visible practice-wide.

Command center for the BAS book

The BAS command center summarises the statement book across clients — what is outstanding, what is in review, and what is ready — exportable for practice meetings.

The ATO/SBR readiness path, honestly

What the platform automates today, what requires ATO-side approvals, and where to see the difference.

What ships in the product

The full SBR technical stack: official ATO message structures for hundreds of product-year forms, schema and validation-rule checking of drafts, secure transport implementation, and a readiness scorecard that verifies your configuration before anything is sent.

What stays with the ATO

Production lodgement requires ATO-side registration steps — conformance testing outcomes, production verification, and interaction whitelisting. These are approval processes between your practice, the platform operator and the ATO; no software can grant them unilaterally.

Where to check the current posture

The Trust Center publishes the current, evidence-bounded status of security and ATO/SBR readiness claims, and the in-product ATO Services command center shows your own configuration's readiness in real time.

The security model in five minutes

How client data is protected, and how you can verify it rather than take our word.

Encryption where it matters

TFNs, ABNs, bank details, MFA secrets and keystores are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. Passwords use bcrypt. Search uses hashed sidecars so sensitive values are not decrypted for lookups.

Access control and MFA

Every user operates under role-based permissions inside an isolated organisation tenancy, and TOTP multi-factor authentication is mandatory for all users — it cannot be disabled.

Audit trail

State changes carry old and new values into an audit log retained on a seven-year cycle, matching Australian record-keeping expectations for tax work.

Verify, don't trust

The Trust Center lists the published controls, their boundaries, and what has not been independently verified — the same standard the product applies to its ATO readiness claims.

Registered Tax Agent use only. These guides describe shipped product behaviour; external ATO approvals and enabled interactions are published with explicit boundaries in the Trust Center.

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