Thirty-two years ago, Jim and I opened the doors of ATB. No cloud software. No email worth speaking of. A fax machine that we thought was cutting edge, ledgers you wrote in by hand, and a simple idea: business owners deserve an accountant who actually cares whether their business succeeds not just whether their tax return gets lodged on time.
In 1994, a new client walked in carrying a shoebox. Receipts, cheque stubs, bank statements the whole year, in cardboard. Ask them what their taxable profit was and you’d get a blank look. They genuinely didn’t know. Nobody did, until we sat down, sorted the shoebox, and told them often months after the year had ended, and sometimes with news they wished they’d heard a lot earlier.
Three decades on, almost everything about how we do the work has changed. The reason we do it hasn’t moved an inch.
The good: technology finally caught up with the job.
When we started, an accountant’s year ran backwards. The shoebox era meant you found out how a client’s business performed nine months after the fact. By the time you spotted a problem, it had already happened. The accountant was a historian accurate, but always too late.
Then, in 2000, the GST arrived. Plenty to complain about there and we will, below but it forced a change few people saw coming: quarterly BAS meant quarterly bookkeeping. For the first time, business owners had to keep their records up to date through the year, and that gave them something they’d never had before a running indicator of how the business was actually performing. The shoebox started to disappear. Looking back, it was the first step on the road from once-a-year history lessons to real-time numbers.
Then came desktop accounting software. Then the cloud and for our clients, that mostly means Xero. Bank feeds, automated reconciliation, dashboards, real-time reporting. What used to take a bookkeeper a week now happens overnight, and the insights that used to live in an accountant’s head are sitting in front of the business owner: which jobs are making money, which customers pay late, where the cash is going. Today we can sit with a client and look at their numbers as they stand this morning not last financial year. The business owner who didn’t know their taxable profit in 1994 can now see it on their phone before their first coffee. Add AI on top, and the job has changed completely: accountants have gone from historians to advisers. The compliance still gets done, but the real value is in the conversation about what the numbers mean and what to do next. That’s the work Jim and I always wanted to do, and technology finally made it possible to do it properly.
The other thing that’s changed for the better? Business owners themselves. Clients today are sharper, better informed, and ask harder questions than they did in the nineties. Good. It keeps us honest, and it makes the advice better.
And Parramatta.
We planted our flag here when plenty of firms wouldn’t look past the Sydney CBD. Watching Western Sydney grow into the economic engine it is today and growing with it has been one of the great privileges of the journey.
The bad: the compliance burden never stops growing.
Now for the honest bit. In thirty-two years, we have never once seen the compliance load on small business get lighter. Not once.
We were there when GST arrived and every business owner in the country suddenly became an unpaid tax collector lodging BAS. Yes, the quarterly discipline had its upside but nobody paid business owners for the extra work. Since then we’ve watched superannuation rules get rewritten so many times we’ve lost count. SuperStream. Single Touch Payroll. And from this July, payday super. Every change is sold as “simplification.” Every change adds another job to the business owner’s plate.
And too often, when governments need revenue, small business owners and people who’ve worked hard to build something a business, an investment property, a super balance are first in the firing line. We’ve said it before and we’ll keep saying it: the people who take the risks, employ the staff, and carry the sleepless nights deserve better than being treated as the easy target.
And then there are the shocks nobody legislates for. The GFC hit in 2008 and we watched good businesses profitable businesses get into serious trouble almost overnight when credit dried up. A decade later, COVID did it again. Here’s what those years taught us, and what we’ve drummed into clients ever since: the businesses that survived and in many cases came out the other side stronger weren’t just lucky. They were prepared, and they were structured correctly. The right entity structure. Assets protected. Cash buffers in place. Numbers they could trust, looked at regularly, not once a year. Resilience isn’t something you find in a crisis. It’s something you build before one.
Part of our job, as we see it, is standing between our clients and that complexity. Translating it. Planning around it. Pushing back on it when it’s wrong. And making sure that when the next shock comes and it always comes our clients are the ones built to withstand it.
What hasn’t changed in thirty-two years.
Here’s the thing. Strip away the technology, the legislation, and the acronyms, and the business owner sitting across the desk from us in 2026 is worried about exactly the same things as the one who sat there in 1994:
- Cash flow — will there be enough in the account to make payroll?
- People — finding good ones, keeping them, and doing right by them.
- Growth — how to get to the next stage without losing control of the business.
- Family — protecting what they’ve built, and one day handing it on.
Those 2am worries haven’t changed. And neither has what fixes them: a trusted adviser who knows your business, knows your family, tells you the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, and is in your corner for the long haul.
That’s what we set out to build thirty-two years ago. It’s why some of the clients who walked through the door in our first years are still with us and in many cases, so are their kids, now running businesses of their own. There is no better measure of a firm than that.
The next chapter.
ATB today is a very different firm from the one we founded accounting and business advisory, wealth strategies, family wealth protection, and a team that stretches well beyond Parramatta. And the next wave of change is already here. We’re genuinely excited about what AI will bring not as a buzzword, but as the next leap in the same journey that took us from the shoebox to Xero. AI will strip away more of the grunt work, surface insights faster, and free up even more time for the conversations that actually move a business forward. We’ve embraced every wave of technology in thirty-two years because each one let us serve clients better, and this one will be no different. We intend to be at the front of it, not dragged along behind it.
But the promise stays the same as it was on day one: we help business owners. We always have. We always will.
To every client, team member, and friend of the firm who’s been part of the last thirty-two years thank you. Here’s to the next chapter.
If you’re a business owner who wants an adviser in your corner for the long haul, give us a call. We’ve been doing this a while.
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