Already in a lease
What your statement is actually telling you
Money leaves your pay into an account the provider holds, and your car's bills are paid out of it. The statement lists every movement and explains none of them. Paste the transactions in and this checks the arithmetic, groups the lines by what they are for, and says whether the balance is building up or running down — and what that means for your next deduction.
Paste the transaction list
Open your provider's portal, select the transactions and copy them — dates, descriptions and amounts. Paste the lot in here. It doesn't matter which provider, what order the rows are in, or whether you get every column. Nothing is uploaded: the reading happens in your browser.
The three things people ask
“What are the GST credits?”
They arrive as money in, so they look like income. They are not: they are GST on something already paid out of the same account, coming back because your employer claims it. A lease rental is GST-inclusive, so the credit against one rental is exactly a tenth of it — a rental of $1,602.81 returns $145.71. That relationship is exact, which is how this page can identify them rather than guess, and how it can tell you when several months' worth have arrived in one batch.
“Whose money is the balance?”
Yours. It is what has come out of your pay and not yet been spent on the car. A surplus is refunded at the end of the lease — but through payroll, and taxed on the way back, because it went in untaxed. So a balance that climbs month after month is not a saving: it is money you pre-paid, held by somebody else, that comes back smaller than it left. The usual cause is running-cost budgets set higher than the car needs, which is worth asking to have lowered.
“Why did my deduction go up?”
Almost always because the account was running down and a review caught it. That is visible months ahead in the balance, which falls steadily rather than holding level — and knowing it early turns a letter you receive into a conversation you start.
What this does not know
- It reads what you paste, and nothing else. If the list is partial, the totals are partial. It cannot see your provider's system, your payroll or your FBT position.
- A line it cannot categorise is still counted in the balance, and named on screen so you can see what it did not understand.
- It is general information, not tax advice. If something here disagrees with your provider, ask them — the questions are written to be sent.
Not in a lease yet? The calculator models one before you sign, and an advertised weekly price can be taken apart before you ask for a quote.