Our Services
Accounting
- Maintenance of accounting books and records
- Preparation of annual and interim accounts
- Advice on financial management
- Business Compliance, Advice and Administration
- Budgeting and Cash Flow Forecasting
- Computer Accounting
Corporate Secretarial Services
- Lodgement of statutory documents
- Conduct Company searches
- Act as a registered office
- Register business names
- Company formation advice
- Maintenance of company statutory records
- Assistance with meetings of directors and shareholders
- Obtaining shelf companies
- General advice on corporate affairs
Associated Financial Services
- Business Coaching & Corporate Culture
- Financial Planning and Investment Advice
- Finance Broking
- Personal Insurance Broking
- Personal Financial Planning
- General Insurance Broking
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Taxation
- General Tax Advice
- Tax Planning
- Payroll Taxes & Workcover
- GST and PAYG
- Capital Gains Tax
- Fringe Benefits Tax
- Superannuation
- Preparation of Taxation Returns
- Tax structure advice
Other Accounting Services
- Corporate Restructuring
- Business Performance Analysis
- Business Improvement Strategies
- Strategic Business Planning
- Retirement and Succession Planning
- Bookkeeping - Click here for more information
- Superannuation fund audit and reporting
- Valuations and investigations
- Establishment of accounting systems
- Assistance with GST accounting software
- New business appraisal
- Leasing/Hire Purchase advice
- Negative gearing advice
- Sale of business advice
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Taxation
Taxation is one of the certainties of life! Because of that, it’s critical to your cash flow and budgeting that you consider tax implications in your business and financial transactions. As a result of our involvement in planning your significant financial transactions we are able to perform cash flow and tax analysis. This helps you determine the most effective way to structure your business and its transactions from a tax advantageous position including succession planning, asset disposal and debt/equity events. Tax planning should not be done in isolation. We will meet with you to discuss your personal investment and taxation objectives and then ensure that any distributions of profit that are proposed are in line with those objectives. As an example, there is no point in taking cash out of the business to make tax efficient investments if that means that your business would become undercapitalised. The most effective tax planning is done before the end of the financial year. We will review your year to date financial statements and make projections for full year profits. Doing this in advance means that we will have time to plan and implement the most tax advantageous distributions of profit, be that in the form of dividends, special bonuses or investments. We will perform a comprehensive review of your past, current and future tax situation and filings. We will ensure you are aware of and compliant with current tax laws so that you make more informed decisions. We will also focus on increasing cash flow and providing you with peace of mind.
Business Compliance and Administration
Many small business owners feel burdened by all of the red tape and administration involved in running their business. This can be a major source of worry and concern for them. Business Compliance and Administration covers everything from company secretarial requirements, to ensuring your insurance cover is adequate, to compliance with mandatory regulations such as healthy and safety, and the Privacy Act. We will ascertain the current legal structure of your business, then lay out various options open to you, listing the pros and cons of each approach. We will then discuss each option with you, outlining the responsibilities and risks you would be taking on under each option. Based on our discussions, we will make the most appropriate recommendation for the legal structure of your business and then, with your agreement, we will coordinate the implementation of that structure. Our specialist corporate secretarial team are able to coordinate all of the legal secretarial requirements of running a business on your behalf. This includes the maintenance of your share register, completion of all statutory forms (these will be sent to you clearly marked for your signature prior to submission) and any correspondence with the relevant authorities. This ensures that you do not run the risk of non-compliance in this important (yet non-core) area of your business. Our intention in working with you on this action step is to act as a project manager, working with your preferred suppliers and/or bringing in specialists that we would recommend to ensure that your business is in full compliance with all business administration issues.
Strategic Business Planning
When people go into business, they have dreams and expectations of what that business will provide for them. In too many cases, in our experience, those dreams are never realised. Whether your dream was financial independence, more time with your family or simply the challenge of doing it your own way, you can take steps to move closer to it by carrying out some strategic business planning. We work with our clients in this area to help them increase the return on investment they get from their business. We can facilitate a strategic planning session for you, and then work with you to implement specific actions arising as a result of that session. We always keep a detailed eye on the numbers, and before any initiative is undertaken we work with you to calculate the potential impact on profitability that you could attain. That way, we help you set targets and are more easily able to hold you accountable to ensure that you implement. The benefits of taking time out to spend a day planning the future of your business are immense. We will act as an independent facilitator for your strategic planning session, bringing our years of experience as SME advisors to the fore. At the end of the session, you will have a clear picture of where your business is headed and what you need to do to get there. We will focus not just on the financials, but also on key strategic areas of your business such as marketing, systems and people. A key measurable of any investment is the return you are getting from that investment. Your business is just like any other investment that you own, except that you are likely to have more tied up in your business than you do in other investments. For that reason, it is doubly important that you are maximizing the return on that investment. We will help you calculate your ROI and then perform some what-if analysis that will show us where you should be focusing your attention to improve it further. It is very important to keep focused on your personal life priorities. Small and Medium Sized Business owners can easily be consumed by their businesses, failing to take time out to think about their life outside of the business. This can lead to difficulties in your personal life. A planning session to align your personal and work life priorities can help you take the right business decisions, without compromising those personal issues that are so important to you.
Personal Financial Planning
All too often we find that our clients become so consumed with their business that they forget about themselves. Our aim when we work with you is to ensure that we help you look after both your business and your personal financial planning. After all, your business is an asset (in many cases, a major asset). The way we look at things, your current business operations and your future financial security are one and the same thing. This action step involves identifying your attitude to risk and your investment opportunities and timeframes, and then marrying the two to develop investment strategies that take all of your objectives into account. We can perform this work alongside your own financial advisor or, if you would prefer, we can introduce you to a specialist in this field. We will perform a comprehensive review of your superannuation funds and other assets, including a valuation of your business. We will bear in mind all taxation liabilities that will crystallise upon you realising those assets. Working together with you, we will help you project forward to the date you hope to retire, to provide a best estimate of the income you are likely to have in your retirement. By undertaking this work now, we can work with you to put in place strategies to increase the value of your assets (e.g. business growth strategies, or reinvesting some of your funds) before it is too late. Implementing this action step ensures that you have the peace of mind of knowing that you are fully insured. This means that your family would be looked after, should the worst happen. As importantly, we will look at the implications from a business point of view. It is not uncommon for an SME to collapse upon the death or serious illness of a key player, so we will work with you to ensure that in that worst case scenario, your business would be adequately covered and able to continue.
Budgeting and Cash Flow Forecasting
This area covers day to day budgeting and cash flow forecasting, comparing actual cash flows to budget, funding for the business and ensuring that your financing charges are under control. We aim to work closely with our clients to ensure that all of these areas are well monitored. Cash is the most important key performance indicator in any business—much more so than profit. If you run out of cash, you are dead in the water. Our goal in this area is to help you implement best practice systems and controls that will steer you well clear of cash flow difficulties. A profit and cash flow forecast is an invaluable management tool. Our team are experts in the preparation of such documents. We will work closely with you to build a forecast tailored specifically for your business, taking into account seasonality and other particular issues pertaining to your business. We recommend that you roll your forecast over at least quarterly, if not monthly, and that it be used as a working document to help you attain profit targets and manage cash effectively. For Small and Medium Sized Enterprise owners, cash is king. It is extremely important that you are able to meet your ongoing monthly commitments, including both loans and trading payables. Our objective in recommending this action step is to work with you to identify all of your commitments and to ensure that you have the cash flow to meet them. If required, we will help you negotiate payment plans to cover short term cash flow difficulties. We will undertake a comprehensive review of each of your existing borrowings, ensuring that the term of each loan is matched with the expected economic life of the asset financed by the loan. We will review the terms and conditions of each loan, with special emphasis on the interest rate, and make recommendations as to the potential savings that could be made through refinancing all or some of your borrowings. You will receive a comprehensive summary of the work done, including a calculation of the potential savings, net of any switching costs or termination fees payable.
Retirement and Succession Planning
Planning for retirement is often the last thing on the agenda for small to medium sized business owners. We believe it should be one of the first. Having a clear plan for what will happen when the day comes when you know longer have the desire (or ability) to go into work will help give you a very clear focus on what needs to be done RIGHT NOW to prepare for that day. Ask yourself this question: what would you like to happen to your business when you are gone? Most of our clients tell us that they would like to see the business continue…yet there are many examples of businesses failing to survive into the next generation. That is why it is important to plan. Whether you intend to sell the business, or pass it on, we can help you develop an action plan to ensure that you are working on the right things, and in the right timeframe. The development of your succession plan will include identifying the various options for the future of your business after you retire. We will then work with you to evaluate each option and put in place the necessary steps to ensure you can attain your preferred option. This could include implementing training programs for the next generation, should you choose to pass the business on, the preparation of complete systems manuals and/or the development of sale documents for your business. Working closely either with your own solicitor, or a specialist that we would recommend, we will address the issue of ensuring that your will reflects your current needs in a timely manner. Taking care of matters such as these, which are so often neglected owing to your focus on your business, can be a weight off your shoulders.
Financial Performance Diagnosis
How would it be if you had your finger on the pulse of what was happening in the financial engine of your business? If at the click of a mouse, you could see the key indicators were moving in the right direction? Or, if they were moving in the wrong direction, that you knew straight away, and soon enough to do something about it. Most business owners accept that being able to diagnose financial performance quickly and easily would be a major benefit to business management. Yet so few businesses have systems in place to provide such data. Our team of financial performance diagnostic experts can work with you to install such as system specifically for your business. The first step in financial performance diagnosis is to understand what has happened in the past. We like to work with at least 3 years' data, and preferably more. Armed with such data, we can provide you with a comprehensive series of key ratios to identify the major trends for your business. This will provide the grounding for us to work with you on various what-if scenarios to plan for the future. Our goal in this area is very simple: to take our financial experience and expertise and our knowledge of systems that work very effectively in other similar businesses, and transfer them to your own business. We will work with you to identify the key performance indicators for your business (a small number of measurables that show that you are on track). We will then design simple systems to allow you to capture the data you need and a reporting system that will give you the data you need for management decision making, when you need it. Using available industry benchmarking data, we will show you how your business is performing compared to the average. This will allow us to identify existing areas of competitive advantage that should be exploited, as well as identifying areas where you are relatively weaker than your competition. These areas will become potential areas for financial improvement, and we will work with you to design strategies to close the gap in those areas.
Customer-Facing Operations
When we work with our clients in this area, we rely on the fact that every day, we are in close contact with hundreds of businesses just like yours. Some are doing incredibly well. Others are underperforming. The majority, as you would expect, fall somewhere in between. We work with a small number of clients who are keen to learn from best practice AND have a desire to implement new ideas in their business to take what we know works and transfer that experience into your business, tailoring it for your specific circumstances, of course. We will facilitate a workshop with your key team members. The workshop will draw out the key differentiators in your business (i.e. why do your customers buy from you, and not your competition?) If necessary, we can go one stage further and involve your customers in the process. Once we all understand the key messages that everyone in your business should be able to recite, we will document them and then work alongside you to communicate them to your team in an effective manner. Customer feedback is critical. Yet many Small and Medium Sized Enterprises have few, if any, processes for capturing such feedback. In consultation with you and your team, we will design feedback systems that might be in the form of face to face sessions, telephone interviews, feedback forms or electronic feedback capture. This will mean that you are able to design your products and services to truly meet your customers' needs. All of our work in this area starts with the numbers. We are not marketing or customer service gurus, but we can certainly work with you to define potential ideas and strategies, and then calculate the financial impact of implementing the ideas. Such an approach ensures we only work on value creating strategies.
Systems and Processes
When we work with our clients in the area of systems and processes, our focus is on general business systems, financial systems and key performance indicators and customer relationship management systems. In our experience, systems can make a huge impact in each of those areas, and you are likely to see increases in productivity, profitability and customer retention as you work on those systems. A key benefit of introducing more systems into your business will be seen when you come to sell the business. A business that relies on its systems, rather than the owners, is clearly worth inherently more. As such, the development of systems and processes goes hand in hand with the work we do to help our clients increase the value of their business as they head toward retirement or are thinking about selling the business. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are financial and/or non-financial measurements that are monitored on a monthly, weekly or daily basis, depending on the KPI in question. We will determine those KPIs that are critical to your business (they are different for each business). We will then implement a system to allow you to capture the relevant data to calculate the KPIs and report them to us. Upon receipt of that information, we will prepare a KPI report, which we will use as the basis of our monitoring program with you to ensure that your business stays on track to reach its targets. Within any Small or Medium Sized Enterprise, there are a number of key systems and processes that must be performed well. The key is to understand what the critical processes are. Once we have done that, we will document how each of those processes is performed and, working closely with the process operators, we will ascertain whether there is scope for improving the existing processes. Finally, we will document the key processes in flowchart format and bring them together in an operating manual. Customer relationship management (CRM) is extremely important for Small and Medium Sized Businesses. We will review your existing systems for communicating with customers and understanding their needs. We will then make recommendations as to how you might improve those systems. These recommendations might include the implementation of a customer database, or a series of programmes to gather feedback from customers.