You may be employing your first employee or already have a team. Setting up and managing your payroll obligations takes time and involves deadlines.
The ATO may impose penalties for late payment of the Superannuation Contribution Guarantee (SGC) payable for your employees, so it is important to stay on top of this, to make sure you know how much you need to pay and by what date.
At Swag Bookkeeeping, our payroll services include weekly, fortnightly or monthly pays, SGC reports and payments, end-of-financial year PAYG Payment Summaries (better known as Group Certificates) and management of commissions and leave entitlements.
If you have increasing demands upon your time and need some payroll support, please contact us and we can discuss your options.
Balancing books can be a bit tricky sometimes. It seems a pretty straight forward process, but it only takes one small error or oversight to mess things up.
If you are recording your transactions manually, it is often just a matter of an amount being recorded incorrectly eg. $1257.49 instead of $1257.94. It can be difficult to pick this up, because our eyes tend to see what we expect to see.
If you are importing your transactions through live bank feeds, it could be a problem with the information coming in to your account. Transactions may have been missed or duplicated, or the opening balance recorded incorrectly.
If you would like us to check your file and find the problem, or to discuss your situation, please click on the Contact Us button, and we will be in touch.
Education: Bachelor of Commerce – La Trobe University
What do you love about bookkeeping?
I have always loved to work with numbers and there is no better feeling than the quest to finally balance. Providing clients insight into the financial side of their business is also very rewarding.
How did you get to work at SWAG?
Through an advertisement on Seek. I was looking for a position where I could further my career and knowledge and yet still be a mum to a young family.
Tell us what you like to do in your spare time.
With the small amount of spare time I get with little children, I enjoy reading, spending time with family and friends, jet-skiing and researching holidays – if I was not a bookkeeper, I would have loved to follow my passion for holidays and planes.
What do you love about bookkeeping?
I have a passion for numbers & details [even though I never liked maths!] and enjoy understanding how business works and contributing to an outcome.
How did you get to work at SWAG?
After responding to an ad & meeting with Sheree I knew it was right for me, on offer was a friendly working environment, flexibility & close to home and especially working alongside like-minded people.
Tell us what you like to do in your spare time.
Enjoy spending time with family & friends, my dogs, long walks & just the simple things in life.
Education: Bachelor of Business (Accountancy)
What do you love about bookkeeping?
I enjoy working with numbers, and providing useful information to business owners about the financial performance and health of their business.
How did you get to work at SWAG?
Sheree was looking for someone to help her expand her business, and placed an advertisement to which I responded. We met for coffee, and formed a business relationship, which now dates back to 2008.
Tell us what you like to do in your spare time.
I enjoy the outdoors, with a particular interest in motorcycling and horse riding. I also enjoy music.
Education: Bachelor of Business – RMIT, Certificate IV in Bookkeeping.
What do you love about bookkeeping?
Balancing the books! It gives the same satisfaction as placing that last piece in a jigsaw puzzle, and knowing it’s helping someone – that it is a useful outcome.
How did you get to work at SWAG?
SWAG originated as Essential Business Support, a business I created as a work-life balance solution when my children were very young. I still love the flexibility it gives me in each working day.
Tell us what you like to do in your spare time.
Potter in the garden, commune with the pets (dogs, cat, chooks, ducks and cockatiels), read, socialise, dance, wine and dine.
Cuba is famous for its cigars, and well known for its old cars. It has a reputation for being a Communist country in a bit of a time warp but a recent trip to Cuba belied this image.
Cuba has an intriguing history of revolution and evolution, heavily influenced by the American embargo and the leadership of Fidel Castro.
Music and dancing are everywhere, even at roadside stops. The salsa rhythms are infectious; the mojitos delicious. Finding a cane farm named Australia was endearing.
Entrepreneurship is being encouraged. Local families are letting out their homes and rooms for tourist accommodation. It is a great way to meet locals, get a glimpse into their daily lives and to enjoy some local hospitality.
Wifi is readily available in Cuba, where they refer to it as “wiffy”, although it can be a bit patchy. You can readily identify where the wiffy connection is good by the groups of people clustered together on steps and outside hotels, heads bowed, all intent on their phones.
Unfortunately, neither Google nor Xero was supported in Cuba ie. unable to be accessed. Apparently, visitors to China experience the same situation. We have since been recommended ExpressVPN as a workaround to get through the Google firewall. Apparently, you can sign up for a month.
Bernadine Oosthuizen was born and raised in Zimbabwe. She immigrated to Australia when she was 18 and became a citizen, later returning to Zimbabwe to get married and commence a life of farming with her husband. Just 9 months later, their farm was taken from them in the ‘land reform program’.
They moved to Zambia to join in-laws on a family farm they started when they also lost their Zimbabwean farms. They were there for a little over 5 years but unfortunately lost those farms too. They decided to immigrate to Australia with their young daughter.
Starting from zero was hard since they had lost everything. Today, they are the proud owners of a small farm (just over 30 acres) and have planted a 10-acre macadamia orchard. Maintaining the orchard keeps them well occupied.
Bernadine also works as an admin/accounts clerk for a local cabinet maker. She is the mother of three girls, aged 11, 9 & 7, and still manages to volunteer for sporting organisations and a school.
Bernadine started with bookkeeping for small clients in Zambia and worked remotely for a luxury safari lodge on the Zambezi river. She continued to work for them for about 3 years after she immigrated to Australia.
Remote bookkeeping for Swag Bookkeeping allows Bernadine to supplement the family income, whilst juggling her family and work priorities and being engaged with her local community. She is a valued member of the Swag Bookkeeping team.
A practical place to start the budget process is to review your cost of living. Adding up the annual costs of maintaining your lifestyle or even the annual costs of the lifestyle to which you aspire, will help you to determine what is the minimum amount of wages or income that your business needs to provide for you.
If you are using an accounting package (e.g. Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, etc.), export your historical data to a spreadsheet and build on this. You will be able to increase the existing expense amounts by a certain percentage to account for expected rises in costs such as CPI. The exported data will also identify individual months that you would expect to pay annual expenses such as insurance, motor vehicle registration, filing fees, etc. Other months can remain blank or recorded as zero.
If you are using figures from your accounting package, be aware that the amounts do not include GST. If your figures are showing a $5000 computer expense, you will have paid out $5500 for this computer purchase at the time.
If your budget results show you need to earn $20,000 in income, be aware that this means you will need to bill out $22,000 in sales invoices – $20,000 in income, and $2000 GST that you are collecting on behalf of the ATO.
If you are building sales targets into your budget, consider what extra costs might be involved in earning this income. You might need to allow for higher marketing costs, more stock, more staff or contractors, etc. Hiring more staff also has associated cost increases such as superannuation and workers compensation.
Once you have completed your budget, record it in your accounting package, so that you can review your actual performance against what you expected. Using a budget on a regular basis (e.g. monthly) to help you to measure how your business is performing against your expectations. Operating with a budget will help to identify issues around income and expenses that need attention.
Xero, Quickbooks and MYOB Essentials users should be able to import this budget into their business accounts as a CSV or Excel file.
To receive a free budget tool that starts with a good look at your living costs, and then feeds this into your business budget, please email [email protected] and put Free Budget Tool in the subject line.
Now is an ideal time to be setting a budget for the 2019 financial year. Many of us think of a budget as something we ‘should’ do, but don’t get around to it. Hopefully, there is some motivation in the following, and a budget will now become an end-of-financial-year priority for you.
We can all get caught up in the day-to-day operation of our business. With all the demands of business, we don’t always give our finances the attention they deserve, even though sound financial performance is essential for our business success. You are more likely to achieve financial success if this is where your attention is.
A budget is a good tool to support setting your business goals for the coming year. A budget encourages you to quantify your goals for the coming year and ideal business growth. For businesses with seasonally affected income, a budget will map out which months to expect higher income, and which months are more likely to be lean.
When looking at goals for increased income, a budget is a tool that allows you to factor in the increased costs of earning more income. You might need to hire more staff, which will not only increase your wages bill but also your superannuation and workers compensation expenses. If you need to purchase a new desk or computer or chair, these costs can also be built into your budget.
A budget is a great tool for measuring and analysing business performance if it is used to measure actual performance against budgeted expectations on a regular basis. Meeting or exceeding budgeted sales targets can be a great motivator to continue with the hard work, a particularly successful product or service, or even marketing exercise.
A budget can help you to identify what is the absolute minimum you need to earn to cover your costs, whether this includes your own income.
A budget can be useful in quantifying the income needed to maintain a consistent or desirable profit margin, particularly when costs increase. Plans on how to achieve increased sales to cover cost increases then can be formulated.
A budget can provide a good basis for projected cash flows, giving you a picture of when money is going to come into the business and when money is going to go out of the business. It will help you to identify if cash flow is going to be a problem at any stage, giving you time to prepare for this.
Your budget will give you some indication of whether you might need to invest more money in your business to achieve your goals, and whether you might need to consider some financing to cover these objectives.
Regular review of actual income and expenses against budgeted expectations can highlight issues with greater than expected costs or lower than expected income on a timelier basis that then allows you to act on a timelier basis. Underperformance is not something you want to wait until the end of the year to discover.
The process of setting a budget and then comparing actual figures and business performance against these projections on a regular basis will provide a lot more clarity and understanding of your business financials, and how they impact on your business success
Budget figures don’t need to set in concrete and can be reviewed and revised as circumstances change, but the benefit lies in creating a budget and using it.
If you have another good reason to prepare and implement a budget for your business, we would love to hear it. Please email [email protected] and use Budget Reason in the subject line.