For Australian accounting firms
Is the registered office fee still worth what it now costs you?
Since 1 July 2026, holding a client company’s address is a designated service. Whatever you charge for it, it now carries customer due diligence, beneficial ownership tracing, screening, a risk rating you keep reviewing and seven years of records. Keep it and price it for the work, or hand the address back.
Work out which services are caughtYour obligations follow the services you provide
Stop providing a captured service and its obligations stop accruing. Your firm is entitled to make that call. For most firms nobody has laid out the options.
Registered office is the clearest case. It is a continuing service rather than a one off, most firms provide it free as a courtesy, and it now carries customer due diligence, beneficial ownership tracing, screening, a risk rating you keep reviewing, and seven years of records after the relationship ends.
This page helps you decide. If you keep the services, that is a good answer too, and Seamlss is built for it.
Start with the registered office, then check the rest
Registered office is the clearest one to decide about, and it is rarely the only service a firm provides. Tick what your firm actually does. The rules follow the activity, whatever the engagement letter calls it.
This sorts your answers. It does not decide anything. It is not a risk assessment, not legal advice, and not a determination about your firm. Use it to frame the conversation with your adviser and whoever owns AML at your firm. It does not replace that conversation.
Nothing is sent anywhere. This runs in your browser and is not recorded.
Before you act on any of this: several of these questions turn on your own facts, and on a few the guidance itself is unsettled. Ceasing a service also has a transition to manage, because a client whose address you hand back needs somewhere to put it and someone has to watch the post until the change is lodged. Take the decision with your own adviser, and do it in tranches rather than all at once.
The full reasoning, with the sources, is in Should your firm still be the registered office?.
Questions firms ask
For the services you keep
Most firms keep something. Those clients still need identity checks, screening, a risk rating and an evidence trail, and the cheapest place to run them is inside the onboarding you already do.
That is what Seamlss is for. It collects the information, runs the identity, sanctions and politically exposed person checks, carries the risk assessment, and keeps the record. Your firm still makes every determination. Seamlss processes over 10,000 requests a month for Australian firms.
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