About SML
Most accountants take a straight line into the profession. This one didn’t.
SML Bookkeeping & Tax is a CPA practice and registered tax agent in Chadstone, Melbourne. It was founded on 31st January 2018 by Maybell Sun, FCPA, and works with owner-led businesses across Melbourne — in English and in Chinese.
The path
Marketing first. Accounting second. Both on purpose.
The usual route into accounting is a single line: accounting degree, accounting masters, professional registration. Maybell’s training ran in a different order.
Her first degree was a Bachelor of Business, majoring in Advertising — so the first thing she learned formally was how a business gets customers through the door. Accounting came afterwards: a Master of Business and a Master of Accounting at the Australian National University, two separate degrees, followed by the professional registrations that make the work accountable.
Read in order, that is the same sequence a business owner actually lives through: how work comes in, how the business is run, where the money goes, and who carries responsibility for the answer. Most of the people helping an owner hold one segment of that line. This practice was built on the whole of it.
Before SML
She has sat on your side of the table.
Before founding the practice, Maybell ran two businesses of her own: a franchise business, and an education company built from scratch. Staff, stock, suppliers, and the months where the timing of money mattered more than the total of it.
That matters here because of a gap most owners run into. Business coaches understand the pressure but cannot touch your books — they are not licensed to. Accounting firms are licensed but have often never carried the risk themselves. The useful conversations usually sit in between.
She is still running businesses today — SML alongside a second company — so this is current experience rather than a line in a biography.
Qualifications — all independently verifiable
What backs the advice.
FCPA
Fellow of CPA Australia — the senior membership grade, held alongside the firm’s status as a CPA practice.
Registered Tax Agent
No. 26140356 — the registration that allows a practice to prepare and lodge tax returns on your behalf, and to access the tax agent lodgment program.
Registered BAS Agent
No. 25965981 — covering BAS, GST, PAYG withholding and superannuation guarantee obligations.
Two masters degrees
Master of Business and Master of Accounting, Australian National University. Bachelor of Business, majoring in Advertising.
SML Bookkeeping & Tax — ABN 18 793 344 346. Registrations can be checked on the Tax Practitioners Board public register.
How we work
Three things clients tend to notice.
We read accounts for structure, not just accuracy. Bookkeeping training teaches you to record a transaction correctly. Audit training — part of the accounting degree — teaches you to ask whether the picture as a whole is true. Both are useful, and they ask different questions of the same file.
We talk about money the way owners do. The question that keeps an owner awake is rarely a ratio. It is whether the next quarter holds together. Reports are only worth producing if they answer that in language you would actually use.
We work in English and Chinese — as translation, not just language. Australian compliance has to be explained so it makes sense to someone whose business instincts were formed elsewhere, and those instincts have to be placed accurately inside Australian rules. Both directions matter.
Who we work with
Owner-led businesses in Melbourne.
Trades and construction, cafes and restaurants, ecommerce, consultants and professional services — businesses where the owner is still close to the work, and where the financial layer has to be dependable without becoming a second job.
The practice has operated through COVID and the measures that came with it, an interest rate cycle, and a difficult stretch for the building industry. Those were the years that decided which businesses had reliable numbers when they needed them.
We work from Chadstone and serve the surrounding area, with meetings in person, by video or by phone.
Next step
Bring the thing you want fixed first.
Bookkeeping, BAS, payroll, a tax return or a second opinion on work already done — start with whichever one is actually bothering you.