Good morning.

Today is a paperwork day. The two items most likely to touch your business are the quarterly BAS and who may type your figures into a chatbot.

In today’s briefing:

📋Tax agents now need your permission before your books go into AI

🎓Free small business AI masterclasses around the country

🧾 MYOB's BAS assistant goes on general sale this month

💼 The fastest AI growth is nowhere near the tech team

📱 Google halves the free AI plan on new Pixels

The Tax Practitioners Board issued its final guidance on AI and the Code of Professional Conduct on 22 July. The core of it is consent: a registered agent must get your permission before putting your client information into an AI tool, and must keep enough oversight to stand behind the output. It binds every tax and BAS agent in the country.

Why it matters for you: If your bookkeeper suddenly asks you to sign something about AI, that is the rule working, not a red flag. If they use AI and have never mentioned it, ask.

Source: Tax Practitioners Board

The National AI Centre's events page lists sessions around the country — one ran in Cockburn Central in WA yesterday — pitched at everyday work, not strategy.

Why it matters for you: Before paying a consultant for an "AI readiness assessment", check whether the government is running the same conversation near you for nothing.

Source: National AI Centre

The Daily Rundown: MYOB's AI BAS tool moves from limited access to something you can buy with a Business Lite or Pro subscription from August, according to MYOB's own product page. It watches transactions through the quarter, flags missing receipts and odd GST treatments, suggests categories you approve or reject, and keeps a readiness score so you are not starting from zero on the 27th. Pricing is $25 a month up to 100 BAS transactions a quarter, rising to $70 above 750, on a 12-month commitment. It is still labelled Beta and handles only cash-based accounts.

Practical takeaway: It does not lodge for you — you or your agent still enter the figures. Worth a look if BAS week eats a weekend.

Source: MYOB

The Daily Rundown: OpenAI published a look at how its business customers actually use its tools on 12 August. Weekly use of Codex, its developer tool, grew 108 times in legal teams since February, 41 times in sales, 41 times in recruiting and 26 times in marketing — against five times in engineering. Early-career staff are the heaviest users.

Practical takeaway: The teams growing fastest are doing repetitive document and admin work, not writing software. If you have been waiting for a technical person to lead this, you are in the wrong room — start with whoever handles quotes and follow-ups.

Source: OpenAI

The Daily Rundown: With the Pixel 11 launch, Google cut the bundled Google One AI Pro trial on the Pro models from 12 months to six. Previous buyers got a full year and could roll it into the next handset, so it stayed free as long as you upgraded. That chain is broken, and AI Pro runs about $33 a month here once billing starts.

Practical takeaway: Translated: the free trial has stopped being a marketing cost and started being a subscription funnel. Put the expiry in your calendar the day you activate it, or the charge arrives in February unannounced.

Source: 9to5Google, Android Police

No single firm to name today, so here is the whole profession. The Access Group's survey of 434 Australian accountants and bookkeepers, reported in March, found 37 per cent saving at least 30 minutes a day — about 125 hours a year — mostly on coding transactions and chasing documents.

Why it matters for you: Thirty minutes a day is the realistic prize, not a transformed business. It is also roughly what the same tools save a builder writing quotes.

Source: Accountants Daily

Copilot in Excel. Describe what you want in plain English — "flag any invoice over 60 days" — and it writes the formula. In training rooms it converts the sceptics: people who will never trust AI with words will happily trust it with a lookup.

Verdict: Worth it if you already pay for Microsoft 365. Not worth a new subscription on its own.

Source: Microsoft

Explaining something technical to a customer is where AI output usually gets worse, because people ask for a summary and get jargon back. Name the audience instead:

Here's what I found on site: [paste your notes]. Write this as a short message to the homeowner. They are not technical. Explain the problem, why it needs doing now, and what happens if it waits. Four sentences, no industry terms.

The line doing the work is "they are not technical". Leave it out and you get a clean paragraph nobody understands.

OpenAI's own numbers say it plainly: the fastest AI growth is in legal, sales, and recruiting — not engineering — because the real prize is repetitive admin, not code. Where to Start with AI Without Guessing is built for exactly that starting point: pick one real task you already do every week (chasing receipts, coding transactions, drafting quotes) and set AI up to do it properly, no technical background required.

And if BAS week eating your weekend sounds familiar, Basic AI Workflows That Save You Hours turns that kind of recurring admin into a repeatable process instead of a scramble. Both are in the AI Foundations track at Vortex Academy.