Most registers are set up once and lived with for years, so the decisions you make when you create an entity matter more than they look. The balance date, the tax jurisdiction and the currency all shape every calculation that follows. These questions cover what you can choose, what is fixed once you have chosen it, and how to hold an entity that does not sit under Australian or New Zealand tax rules at all.
Do I have to use a 30 June or 31 March balance date?
No. Those are the defaults, not the limits. An entity can run to any calendar month end: 30 June for an Australian entity, 31 March for a New Zealand one, 31 December for a calendar-year entity, or any of the other nine. You pick the financial year when you create the entity and everything downstream follows it, including the depreciation calculation, the year-end roll and the periods offered in reporting.
The balance date is set per entity, not per organisation, so entities on different year ends can sit in the same group and be reported on together.
What is a substituted accounting period?
A substituted accounting period, or SAP, is an income year ending on a date other than the standard one for your jurisdiction. In Australia that means a balance date other than 30 June, most commonly adopted by a subsidiary aligning to a foreign parent’s year end. A SAP has to be approved by the Commissioner, and that approval is between you and the ATO. What Dwindle needs is the resulting balance date, which you set on the entity like any other financial year.
Can I change an entity’s balance date later?
No, and this is deliberate. The financial year start, the opening balance date and the tax jurisdiction are fixed once the entity is created. Every closing value in the register is the product of those three settings, so changing one after assets have been depreciating would silently invalidate the history behind the current numbers. If the balance date genuinely needs to change, that is a new entity, which also leaves the prior register intact as a record of what was reported at the time.
The same logic fixes the structure of your valuation bases. Which books an entity runs, and whether each one follows jurisdiction rules, is decided when you create it: you can rename a basis afterwards, but you cannot add or remove one. It is worth a moment’s thought at setup, because a book you might want later is far easier to create now and leave running than to introduce once there is history to reconstruct.
Can I hold an entity that is not Australian or New Zealand?
Yes, by setting the entity to no tax jurisdiction. It runs pure accounting depreciation on your own financial year and in your own currency, with no ATO or IRD rules applied. This suits a foreign subsidiary you need on the same balance sheet, a trust or holding entity whose register is maintained for accounting purposes only, or any book where the tax treatment is handled elsewhere and you want the depreciation itself governed properly.
The boundary is straightforward: no jurisdiction means no jurisdiction rules. Dwindle does not compute the tax rules of any other country, so the tax position for that entity is determined outside the system. What Dwindle holds is the register itself, on the bases you define, with a full audit trail behind every number in it.
Jurisdictions are built into Dwindle one at a time, as a full rule set rather than a rate table: New Zealand went live in July 2026 with Investment Boost, the IRD rate schedule, the low-value write-off and the pool method. An entity you hold with no tax jurisdiction today is a normal entity in the register, so if its jurisdiction is one we build next, its history is already there.
What does no tax jurisdiction actually turn off?
The jurisdiction-specific rules and nothing else. There are no car cost limits, no instant asset write-off or low-value thresholds, no pooling and no GST handling, because each of those is a creature of a particular tax act. Depreciation method, rate, effective life, opening balance, residual value, disposals and balancing adjustments all work exactly as they do on an Australian or New Zealand entity.
What changes is that no book on the entity can have jurisdiction rules switched on. Every valuation basis depreciates on the method, rate and effective life you specify, rather than on a rule set Dwindle applies for you. You can still run as many books side by side as you need, and name them whatever suits the entity, including a tax book you maintain to a foreign regime yourself.
What currency does each entity use?
An Australian entity reports in AUD and a New Zealand entity in NZD, derived from the jurisdiction so the two cannot drift apart. An entity with no tax jurisdiction has no currency imposed on it, so you choose.
Each entity reports in its own currency, and its register is held in the currency the assets were actually recorded in, which is the version you want when the numbers have to be defended. Currency conversion and cross-currency consolidation are not part of Dwindle today, so a group spanning currencies reports entity by entity rather than as a single combined total.
Can entities with different jurisdictions and year ends sit in the same group?
Yes. An entity group can hold Australian, New Zealand and no-jurisdiction entities together, each on its own rules, its own income year and its own currency. The rules are applied per entity rather than per workspace, so a group with an Australian trading company, a New Zealand subsidiary and an offshore holding entity is one register to govern, review and report on, not three.