Scope & limitations
Lodgey is a tax preparation agent — not a registered tax agent, financial adviser, or legal professional. Here’s where the boundaries are.
What Lodgey handles
Section titled “What Lodgey handles”- Organising and categorising tax documents
- Extracting data from settlement statements, loan documents, payslips, and receipts
- Building ATO-aligned spreadsheets with rental schedules, CGT calculations, and PAYG variations
- Applying published ATO rules (thresholds, rates, depreciation schedules, cost base elements)
- Running calculations and verifying arithmetic with code execution
- Identifying evidence gaps against ATO requirements
- Searching Gmail for missing documents
- Providing interactive calculators for what-if scenarios
What Lodgey won’t do
Section titled “What Lodgey won’t do”Tax advice
Section titled “Tax advice”Lodgey does not give personalised tax advice. It applies published rules to your data and shows you the numbers, but it cannot:
- Recommend a specific tax strategy
- Tell you whether to hold or sell a property
- Advise on trust distribution strategies
- Recommend entity restructuring
- Provide binding interpretations of tax law
For advice, you need a registered tax agent or accountant.
Lodge your return
Section titled “Lodge your return”Lodgey prepares your data — it does not lodge returns with the ATO. You’ll need to:
- Lodge via myTax yourself, or
- Hand the workbook to your accountant/tax agent for lodgement
Unsupported scenarios
Section titled “Unsupported scenarios”Lodgey is built for Australian property investors. It has limited or no coverage for:
- International tax obligations (foreign income, double tax treaties)
- Business income (sole traders, partnerships — beyond rental/employment)
- Complex trust distributions with multiple beneficiaries
- SMSF compliance and reporting (beyond basic property holdings)
- Cryptocurrency or share trading gains
- Medicare levy exemptions and surcharge calculations
- Private rulings or ATO disputes
Data it can’t access
Section titled “Data it can’t access”- ATO portals (myGov, ATO Online) — Lodgey cannot log in on your behalf
- Bank portals — you need to download statements manually
- State revenue offices — for stamp duty or land tax lookups
- Employer payroll systems — you need payslips or payment summaries
Accuracy boundaries
Section titled “Accuracy boundaries”Calculations
Section titled “Calculations”Lodgey verifies tax calculations by running independent Python scripts. However:
- Marginal rate calculations use current published brackets — they may not reflect mid-year legislative changes
- CGT indexation uses published CPI figures up to the last available quarter
- Depreciation calculations follow standard effective life tables — your asset may have a different effective life
Document reading
Section titled “Document reading”Lodgey’s document extraction is accurate but not infallible:
- Scanned PDFs with poor quality may produce extraction errors
- Handwritten receipts are harder to read than printed documents
- Complex multi-page documents (e.g., 40-page depreciation schedules) may need you to confirm key figures
Evidence status
Section titled “Evidence status”- Confirmed evidence has been cross-referenced against an uploaded document
- Estimated evidence should be treated as a starting point — always confirm with the actual document before lodging
- Lodgey will explicitly flag when a figure is estimated vs confirmed
When to stop and call a professional
Section titled “When to stop and call a professional”Lodgey will tell you when it’s out of its depth, but as a rule of thumb — involve a professional if:
- You’re dealing with an ATO audit or review
- You have overseas income or assets
- You’re restructuring entities (trusts, companies, SMSFs)
- You need a private ruling on a specific transaction
- You’re unsure whether something is a repair (deductible) or an improvement (capital)
- The numbers don’t add up and you can’t figure out why
- You’re claiming deductions that feel aggressive — a human should sanity-check