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One Melbourne practice has made a virtue out of showing builders and plumbers there’s a better way to handle all their paperwork.
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Tax for Tradies turns record-keeping into a craft
07 November 2022
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11 minute read
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“I kept receiving shoeboxes of receipts from the tradies,” says specialist accountant Michael Gallagher, and I thought this is “limiting what they could claim.”
Since tradespeople already made up the majority of the clientele for his firm, Gallagher Accountants, he made a landmark decision: to set up Tax for Tradies, which since 2011 has specialised in sorting out the fiddly tax returns of plumbers, electricians, and builders.
“I saw a need for tradies to be looked after in a financial sense,” he said
Mr Gallagher knew a priority for the firm had to be showing tradies there was a better way of handling receipts.
Now his tradie clients snap a photo of their receipts and invoices and upload them onto a Hubdoc or Dext app.
They can be used directly by business accounting packages from Xero, MYOB, or QuickBooks, and the firm then creates financial accounts as needed and prepares tax returns.
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It’s a long way from where Mr Gallagher started as a public practitioner more than a decade ago — with just one client acquired while he was teaching postgraduate students on the principles of taxation law.
That one client was enough to start his own accounting firm, operating out of his Melbourne home, and until 2015 he ran it alongside his teaching job.
Mr Gallagher said he wanted his knowledge to be of benefit to “the general commercial community by delivering sound tax advice to people who operate businesses”.
“They say those who can’t do, teach, so I didn’t want to be one of those. I wanted to certainly do, as well as teach.”
He decided to go full time at his firm after bringing in a CPA, Ross Walker, in 2015 and within two years he had hired an administration manager, Melissa Wright, as well.
Now operating as a tight-knit team of three in a commercial office, Tax for Tradies is progressing "reasonably quickly”, he said.
Nine out of 10 clients are still tradies, from the employed to the self-employed, from those who operate trusts to those who run companies.
Mr Gallagher saw some potential in the “Tax for Tradies” brand and thought it could have the makings of a successful franchise with a national footprint. His firm has already expanded and now serves clients in NSW, Queensland, and Tasmania.
And it has branched out in other directions, too. There’s now a Tax for Nurses, Tax for Doctors, and Tax for Truckies.
“Taxes are a very serious subject, but it’s also very much what we do,” he said. “Our lives are very much entwined with taxation.”
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