There’s lots to do when businesses engage a new worker. As an employer, you’ll be busy going through the onboarding process and showing your new employee the ropes, but there are other important things to do when you add a new member to your team.
Keeping accurate records complete with the right information is essential for businesses to maintain, and that means updating and adding data when engaging a new worker. Here are some things to keep in mind as you go through this process:
I’ve tried and tested hundreds of software programs over the last 25 years and I’ve noticed something very interesting in the last 12 months – they’ve gotten so complicated!
Email marketing is commonplace these days and you know it’s a money spinner when Intuit buy Mailchimp.
Email Marketing is complicated
The cost of email marketing software has gone up and up and up and all the software vendors are increasing their prices at the moment. I thought Xero was pushing it with their yearly price increase but Aweber is similar to Mailchimp and they recently increased one of their monthly packages from $10pm to $55pm – that’s OVER 500% increase.
PEPPOL is a global way for accounting systems to avoid the entire email system as we know it and Xero are registering every business unless you opt out by 13th November – and it’s included in our Bookkeeping courses.
Is this a new closed network that eliminates any invoice and bill paying spam? Yes, pretty much.
I remember teaching people how to use email when it first arrived in our lives in the late 1990’s and it is now the most common way to “authenticate” yourself as a real person.
It is also one of the most common ways to be scammed, spammed and phished!
There are many finance professionals — who does your business need?
Does your business need a bookkeeper, accountant or perhaps just a BAS agent – or a little bit of everyone?
WE’VE MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY THAT finding a bookkeeper, when you may not know much about bookkeeping, can be a difficult task.
In fact, a lot of new business owners assume their accountant will take care of everything for them, which may be costly if their accountant has to perform a year’s worth of bookkeeping in order to file the business’s tax return. But bookkeepers and accountants can work harmoniously in your business.
As a general rule, every business needs at least two finance professionals working on their business accounts, but which two professionals you’ll need to hire depends on your business needs. If you’re not sure who you need to hire for your business, here’s a cheat sheet to help you out.
Bookkeepers (not registered with the TPB)
An independent bookkeeper not employed by an accountant and not registered with the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB) may only perform basic bookkeeping services, such as the
entering of receipts,
coding financial transactions,
generating invoices and purchase orders
accounts receivable and accounts payable
If you hire this type of bookkeeper, you’ll still need an accountant.
BAS agents
BAS agents must, by law, register with the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB), which certifies that they are qualified and have completed the necessary continuing education requirements to perform the tasks of a BAS agent, which involves carrying out most of the bookkeeping tasks mentioned above, in addition to preparing and lodging business activity statements on a business’s behalf.
If your business is registered for GST, you will need to file regular activity statements. If you hire a BAS agent, you’ll also need an accountant. In some instances, you may find a BAS agent who’s also a registered tax agent and vice versa, who may be able to take care of all your taxation needs.
Tax agents
Although tax agents, like BAS agents, must also register with the Tax Practitioner’s Board (TPB), a tax agent is focused on income tax — how much income you have to declare, how much you can claim back, etc.
This is distinct from a BAS agent who is concerned with the day-to-day financial tasks of your business (bookkeeping and BAS lodgements). That said, some tax agents will also perform some the basic bookkeeping tasks on a regular basis, though they primarily specialise in lodging tax returns.
If you’re not registered for GST, and your tax agent will also perform regular bookkeeping tasks (or you can do it yourself), you may not need to hire an accountant. In some instances, you may find a tax agent who’s also a registered BAS agent and vice versa, who may be able to take care of all your taxation needs.
Accountants
An accountant is mostly concerned with planning and strategy. Unlike bookkeepers and BAS or tax agents, an accountant will assess and advise you on what actions you should take to maximise your income. Great accountants will get involved with planning the direction of your business and ensure it’s been structured properly and that you’re meeting any additional tax obligations.
They’ll also help you to make strategic purchases for equipment and machinery, and work with your BAS agent or bookkeeper to ensure these decisions are reflected in your daily financial records. An accountant is also able to prepare and lodge tax returns on your behalf.
How much should I pay a bookkeeper?
Check out the National Bookkeeping Directory, which features the details of bookkeepers, capable of doing data entry and clerical tasks, through to high-level accounting work as undertaken by BAS agents, accountants and CFOs.
You can also see the National Bookkeeping rates page to find out what level bookkeeper your business needs.
The constant need for some companies to continue to grow revenue or subscriber numbers can make the employees do things too aggressively.
Xero has always done a great marketing job against MYOB because it was easy – all they had to do was have good software that was easier to use and in the cloud – now they’re ALL in the Cloud!
Xero focused on a cloud only model and the integrations between it and other online software programs. This was a marketing strategy that may have stretched the truth a little!
MYOB’s problem was that is WAS a Windows based software program. This made using the software harder because you had the constraints of running only on a Windows computer and had to upgrade that software regularly. It also caused issues with their Mac version and they ended up having to discontinue that software and push their Mac users straight to their Cloud version, MYOB Essentials.
I’ve been getting up at 5.15am for the last 2 years – am I crazy?!
I’ve been getting up early because I work out with some friends and prefer early mornings to late nights. This means that I’m going to bed earlier and not working as much at night.
In the past I preferred to work late into the night and pushed myself to get as much work done as I possibly could. Sometimes this meant working until midnight but I noticed that the quality of the work wasn’t always the best.
The sun rises pretty early and I’d rather work with the natural light of the day than the artificial light of the night. I dug a little deeper into this and discovered that there are studies that explains how we perform at various times of the day and how that is affected by when we get up and go to bed – Circadian Rhythms.
Circadian Rhythms can affect how well you perform when studying too..
Business owners can now get a discount on our MYOB & Xero and Microsoft Office COMPLETE courses if they don’t need a Certificate of Completion.
I recently wrote about the value of Certificates and who really needs one and we’ve discovered that most business owners prefer to focus on getting the knowledge to use their software better AND saving money – that’s why we introduced NoCert discounts.
With $41.9 Billion budgeted to be spend on the NDIS there is little wonder everyone is exploring disability care as either a job opportunity or a business opportunity. It’s not just individuals who are exploring this industry but accounting software and technology firms too.
I wrote about HNRY, the full service accounting software, accountant and bank account for small business owners that only charges a small percentage to cover ALL of these costs but other firms are also appearing to help everyone in the NDIS ecosystem, including Splose.
We’re approaching the end of the financial year and everyone will be reading and trying to understand their annual financial reports, particularly if they have outstanding Superannuation to pay (and claim) or they need funding.
I’ve written in the past about how to create a cashflow forecast using Xero and Excel and this post is a summary of good practices and recommendations when it comes to cashflow reporting
Business owners who need to learn how to use MYOB and Xero like the added support that is available if they have a question that relates to their own business.
Unlike Job Seekers who choose MYOB and Xero COMPLETE training courses to learn as much as they can about these bookkeeping programs, Business owners often have questions which relate to things they want to resolve in their business.
Most of the questions students have are solved as they progress through the logical order of the courses we’ve created but sometimes things get a little weird.
Intuit revealed the name change to their QuickBooks Payroll customers today as part of an acquisition of KeyPay owner by Employment Hero.
If all that didn’t make sense the only real change here is that KeyPay will be rebranded as Employment Hero. Employment Hero has been around since 2014 and purchased KeyPay owner, Webscale Pty Ltd in 2021.
The messy part of this from my perspective is that Intuit, who owns Tsheets is now depending on Employment Here for their payroll solution. It also means that we now have an Employment Hero training course 🙂
Am I a bookkeeping nerd or is everyone else also seeing these “financial” advertisements for tax lodgement, easy bookkeeping and 6 month FREE access to accounting software?
It’s interesting to see a new accounting software company appear in Australia despite the fact that many have come and gone in the past – particularly during this market downturn for technology shares! Their offer is pretty compelling though..
These are the market leading workforce management integrations for rostering, scheduling and time and attendance monitoring. Deputy was one of the first but the major accounting software companies are now snapping them up.
The most interesting story here has been KeyPay. I’ve loved the fact that Intuit partnered with the Australian company KeyPay to provide all of the local Australian payroll functionality in their QuickBooks Online software. Tsheets would also have been in this list but you know what happened to them..
It certainly is an interesting time we’re going through financially. Most of us (around the world) are hurting because of higher costs and as a result the RBA increases interest rates so we focus on paying down our debts rather than consuming more things. Some people I’ve been speaking with are predicting even worse times ahead and the recent sacking of staff from Xero and Atlassian show the global trend is affecting Australia.
After hearing about the recent sackings at Xero it was interesting to see what else was going on at Xero. The two things that stood out the most to me was an improved Approval button for invoicing (and that there are now two versions of invoicing) and how Dinesh Aggarwal from Fortuna Advisory is finding it harder to hire local staff so he’s outsourcing.
My last blog post was about the different ways that Twitter can make money. One of the most compelling reasons that I read about recently was as a payment gateway like WeChat. Apparently WeChat is a SuperApp that does lots of things and Elon Musk was impressed by it when he learnt about it in a visit to China to open his Tesla Gigafactory there.
Naturally I dug a little deeper to see if Xero currently integrates with Twitter and it does but not for payments.
The end of the calendar year, school holidays, summer and Christmas all combine to give us all a break from what we’ve been doing all year. It’s also a time for reflection about what we’ve done during the year and of things we would change in the new year.
One of the challenges we faced this year was trying to explain the differences between our training courses and those provided by dozens of new training options which are now available – even Youtube!
Udemy is a particularly interesting challenge because they are not a training company but a Learning Management System that also spends money advertising some of the courses on their platform.
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…