If you are a director or secretary of an Australian company, the recurring ASIC company obligations you actually have to manage are not spread evenly across the calendar. Most of them hang off one anchor: your company's annual review date. That date belongs to your company, not to the financial year, so two companies registered a week apart can face their review weeks apart. Getting that anchor wrong is the single most common reason officeholders end up paying late or lodging changes in a rush.
This guide sets out the yearly operating rhythm around ASIC's company annual review: what arrives, what you check, what you pay, and the one deadline pair that trips people up. It stays with the recurring tasks only; one-off registrations and industry-specific licensing are signposted rather than covered.
Start by finding your annual review date
Everything else follows from this. Your company's annual review date is shown on the company annual review statement you download from ASIC. Practical advice: put that date, plus a reminder two weeks earlier, into a calendar that more than one person in the company can see. A review done from memory is a review done late.
If nobody in the company has accessed the statement before, the entry point is ASIC's online services for company officeholders, where you can log in or sign up to ASIC's portals. Setting that access up is itself part of the recurring rhythm: without portal access, each year's statement, invoice and payment details sit unread in someone else's inbox.
What ASIC sends each year
Based on ASIC's published guidance on the company annual review, three things matter here:
- The annual statement. ASIC states that the annual statement lists the details ASIC has about your company. Read it as a snapshot of your regulatory file, not as junk mail.
- The annual invoice. The same downloaded statement includes your annual invoice and payment details. The amount and the due date are on that document, so check it there rather than assuming last year's figures still apply.
- Portal access. Registration and login for company officeholders run through ASIC's online services.
That is the whole of the annual review package. What makes it useful is what you do with each line on the statement.
Treat every line on the statement as a question
The practical habit worth building is to read the statement line by line and ask of each item: is this still true? The statement lists the details ASIC holds, and those details drift. Offices move, directors resign, secretaries are appointed, shareholders change, and none of those events waits for the annual review to come around.
Where a detail has changed, the correction is generally a company details change lodged with ASIC. The specific form, the notification timeframe and any fee are set out by ASIC and can change, so confirm them on ASIC's website at the time you make the change rather than relying on a checklist written years ago. This is the area where guides go stale fastest, and where being roughly right is not good enough.
The recurring tasks in one table
| Task | What triggers it | Where to confirm the detail |
|---|---|---|
| Download the annual review statement | Each review cycle | ASIC online services for company officeholders |
| Check the details ASIC holds against your own records | Each review cycle, plus any change during the year | Your annual statement and ASIC's company details guidance |
| Pay the annual invoice | Due date shown on the invoice | Payment details printed on the statement |
| Pass a solvency resolution | Within 2 months of the annual review date (per ASIC) | ASIC guidance on the company annual review |
| Notify ASIC if no solvency resolution was passed | Within 7 days (per ASIC) | ASIC guidance on the company annual review |
| Keep company registers and records current | Continuous; review them alongside the annual statement | ASIC guidance and your adviser |
The solvency task, and why it catches people
This is the part with actual clocks attached. ASIC states that if you have not passed a solvency resolution within two months of the company's annual review date, the company must notify ASIC within seven days.
Note the shape of that: there are two separate timelines, not one.
- Two months from the annual review date to pass the resolution.
- Seven days to notify ASIC if the resolution was not passed in that window.
In practice, officeholders remember the first deadline and forget the second. If the two-month window closes without a resolution having been passed, you are not simply late — you have moved into a separate notification obligation with its own short deadline.
One qualification matters here: this guidance is general. How the solvency requirement applies to your particular company depends on your company's type and circumstances, and that is outside what this article can tell you. Confirm the application to your situation against ASIC's own guidance or with your accountant or lawyer before relying on it.
Tasks that sit alongside the review
Not every ASIC obligation arrives once a year. Three groups sit outside the annual review but are worth folding into the same yearly check.
Changes during the year. Company detail changes are triggered by the change itself, not by the review cycle. Waiting until the statement arrives to fix something that changed in March is how records fall out of date.
Your own registers and records. The company maintains its own registers and records; the annual statement is a good moment to reconcile them against what ASIC holds. Discrepancies found early are cheap to fix.
Licensing questions. If the company provides financial services, that is a separate obligation stream from the annual review. ASIC publishes information and steps on how to apply for an Australian financial services (AFS) licence. If your company's activities changed over the year, check whether that licensing question is now live for you — and treat it as its own project, not a line item on the review.
Questions to verify for your own company
Before you pay anything, work through these against the documents in front of you:
- What is the exact annual review date shown on your statement, and who else in the company knows it?
- What amount and due date appear on the annual invoice this year?
- Which line items on the statement are wrong today, and what does ASIC currently specify as the process and timeframe for correcting them?
- Was a solvency resolution passed within two months of the review date? If not, has the seven-day notification already been given?
- Did the company's activities change this year in a way that raises an AFS licensing question?
- Who has portal access, and is that still the right person?
Any answer you cannot source to your own statement or to ASIC's current website should be treated as unverified.
Your next step this week
Do three things, in this order. First, log in or sign up to ASIC's online services for company officeholders and download the current company annual review statement — do this even if you believe you know what it says. Second, read the statement against your own registers and diarise three dates: the review date, the invoice due date, and a date two months after the review date for the solvency question. Third, note anything on the statement that is wrong and look up ASIC's current process for correcting it.
That is roughly twenty minutes of work and it removes almost all of the annual scramble. Keep last year's statement too: comparing two consecutive versions shows you what actually changed.
This article is general information about Australia. It is not personalised legal, tax, accounting or financial advice, and it does not take account of your company's circumstances. ASIC sets these requirements, publishes the applicable fees, forms and timeframes, and may change them. Confirm current details on asic.gov.au or with a qualified adviser before acting. Australian Ltd is an independent publisher; it is not ASIC, a regulator, a lender or a broker, and it does not assess or approve any company's compliance.