When business gets tough, where’s your bookkeeper?

If you don’t have a book keeper, then now’s the time to get a contract bookkeeping service to come in and get your accounts upto date. We’re not saying that just because we’re bookkeepers.

We’ve had a couple of Oxenford clients expressing concern about slow paying clients, or even clients that are unable to pay their bills. So when business gets tough, where’s your bookkeeper?

If you don’t have a bookkeeper that’s keeping a close track of your income / expenditure, you could soon find yourself in trouble financially. Clients that may well have always paid their invoices within 30 days start stretching them out to 60 days. Sixty day accounts become 90 days. Three months roll into four months

Worst still, suddenly the door closes on your client’s business, and you are left out of pocket. AS chance would have it, your small business is the one that probable needs the money the most, and tends to be the one at the back of the queue if and when there’s any money being handed out to creditors.

You may have a copy of an accounting software package such as Quickbooks or MYOB sitting on a shelf in your office collecting dust. You may even have the software installed on your computer, and have been struggling working out how to operate the thing.

Don’t delay any longer

We’ve noticed an increase in clients contacting us to get their 2006 – 2007 tax returns upto date. Rather than burying their heads in the sand, they’ve picked up the phone and called us or emailed us to get their bookwork sorted out.

You can email us your quickbooks or MYOB date files. You can put them in an express bag, or we can organise to have our of our mobile bookkeeping team come round and get all your paperwork sorted out on your premises

So when business gets tough, you’re not the ones who’ll miss out with unpaid invoices. Before business gets tough, contact us to become your bookkeepers

Often it’s a simple mistake made because you are in a hurry, or panic about a particular order that you have to fulfil. Contact us for more information

We can all make mistakes in the course of our business day, whether you’re based in Ormeau, Yatala, Beenleigh or Coomera, good bookkeeping is an important part of your business.

9 tips to avoid paying the same invoice twice

Here’s nine tips to ensure that you and / or your bookkeeper never pay the same invoice twice:

1 Always make a payment from an invoice, and not a statement
The statement may not take into account a recent payment that you have made

When you look at the supplier statement and see the total outstanding amount you may get feelings of guilt and pay the whole amount showing on that statement

2. Have your book –keeper keep your accounting up to date.
By entering all payments and invoices regularly into the system before you pay your invoices, you can match the statements and outstanding invoices with your bookkeeping system quickly

3.Set aside a specific day for paying your bills.
You can ask your bookkeeper for a report of outstanding bills, or simply have a folder marked “Bills to pay”
So if you receive a statement, place it in the folder, and on the assigned bill payment day, you can match any outstanding bills with the statement

4. Use Purchase Orders and keep delivery dockets
Often small business owners may get their purchase orders and delivery dockets mixed up. In some cases your supplier may use the invoice as a delivery docket, and then send you another copy of the same invoice when requesting payment.

So, if you are not diligent, you can easily find yourself paying the same invoice twice thinking that they were two separate invoices.

5. Do not make a payment based on a phone call.
In a slower economy, when everybody is chasing payments from everybody else, it’s easy to make a payment based on a phone call from a supplier. Just because they are chasing a payment, it does not mean that a particular invoice is still outstanding

6. No invoice – no payment
Just as we suggest to our business owners that they shouldn’t pay any staff claims for cash reimbursements without a proof of purchase, neither should you make a supplier payment without an invoice in your hand

7. A Delivery Docket is not the same as an invoice
Your supplier may issue a numbered delivery docket with prices included, but it’s not a tax invoice. Ensure that your bookkeeper does not enter the delivery docket as an invoice, as well as entering the invoice relating to the same order. If they can’t find the invoice, then ask the supplier to issue a copy of the invoice

8. Reconcile your bank accounts each month
At the same time you should get a report of suppliers invoices and reconcile them against your suppliers statements
If the two do not balance, then your bookkeeper may have entered an invoice twice. Once you’ve paid your supplier twice, it’s not always so simple to get a refund

9. Enter suppliers invoices into your accounting system
By ensuring your have suppliers invoices entered, you can quickly check for duplicate in voice numbers, which may warn you that you’ve entered an invoice twice

Contact us for more information

Would you get a Bank Loan if you had no way of repaying the debt?

As a small business owner in Ormeau, Yatala, Beenleigh or Coomera, what response would you get from the Bank when you asked them for a loan with absolutely no plan to pay the debt back?

As freelance bookkeepers servicing the northern end of the Gold Coast, we are often asked to get the bookwork upto date for small business owners. Preparing the Profit and Loss Reports, ensuring the balance sheet is correct, so that the small business owner can seek extra capital to develop their business. Contact us for more information

If you have no plan, if you cannot prepare a budget to show how the debt will be repaid, what are the chances of you getting finance from the bank?

The Federal Government’s monetary policy has been totally misunderstood

Obviously the situation is very different when you run the country. You can stand up in Parliament in Canberra, with a majority of “yes men” behind you, and share your monetary policy with the nation.

To give Kevin Rudd full benefit, we should point out that the Federal Government’s monetary policy has been totally misunderstood. How silly of us not to realize that in fact it’s a “money-tree” policy.

Rudd, and Swann seem to have a money tree in their back yard, and at the sniff of any trouble they can turn to their money-tree policy and throw the country into more debt.

Everybody is wondering how effective Government’s $10.4 billion spending package before Christmas has been!

Many economists predict that the recession has a long way to go. So the Rudd Labor Government reckons the best way out of this situation is to spend money that he hasn’t got – Is that how his family have amassed a $millions fortune?

For those small business owners that can remember the previous “Recession we had to have”, you’ll know that the previous Labour Government left a legacy of $96 billion in government debt and the Budget had been in deficit for six successive years.

It only took the Australian people a decade to repay this debt (after selling off much of the family jewels in commodities.

According to the Kevin Rudd, the simple solution to Australia’s current problems is to demand that all us hard working Australians to agree to plunge headlong back into large deficits and significant debt, to the tune of $9500 for every Australian.

Well, they say”: If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” If you don’t have it, and you happen to run a country, then just create it! The Labour Government’s Money-Tree policy seems to be to throw Australia deeper into debt with a poorly considered and ineffective $42 billion “fiscal stimulus” package.

Meanwhile Malcolm Turnbull (who’s always quick to look for an opportunity to improve his popularity) is pushing for the Australian Government to bring forward the proposed tax cuts currently scheduled for 1 July 2009 and 1 July 2010 be brought forward, and backdated to 1 January this year.

By the middle of 2010 this would leave a two-income household earning $80,000 approximately $1700 better off.

As a hard working Australian, and small business owner, you must have a real “warm and fuzzy” feeling knowing that your taxes are being so wisely invested while you struggle to make ends meet.

Without Australia’s anonymous heroes this nation would not be what it is today!

This year Australia Day falls on a Monday, so the nation gets a long weekend!

There’s a certain sector of the community with a big chip on their shoulders, who do not seem to want to move on with their lives, and want to call an event that happened over 200 years ago “Invasion Day”

Well, that’s fine, if it makes you feel better. However, why not join your fellow countrymen, who’ve realised that you can’t change the past, and instead take a more positive approach? Get over it, and move forward. On the one hand you want integration, and on the other you want to promote discrimination.

Happy “Australia Day” Australia! Let’s just party!

When a financial planner contacts a bookkeeping service because they are eighteen months behind in the paperwork, there’s a touch of irony.

It’s like the sparkie who still hasn’t wired up some extra powerpoints in his house though his wife’s been nagging him for three months

Or the accountant who has not lodged their own tax return for a couple of years

Business owners can get so caught up in the busy-ness of every day activities that they can never seem to find time to work on their business.

Even financial planners need the help of freelance bookkeepers to help them with the genera bookkeeping duties such as entering customer and supplier invoices, entering receipts, and calculating fuel expenses etc

Unless you’re passionate about bookeeping, you’ll always find excuses for putting it off.

As a bookkeeping service covering Yatala, Ormeau, Pimpama, and Beenleigh, we are often called up to tidy up the mess that has accumulated over the past few months. Contact us for details

Even with purchasing an accounting software package such as MYOB or Quickbooks, the business owner is still faced with the task of having to find a few spare hours a week or a month to enter all the book-keeping data.

Unless you have a passion for doing the bookeeping yourself, you’ll always find excuses for putting it off. After all, why should you make bookkeeping a priority of your Yatala, Ormeau, Pimpama, and Beenleigh business?

A widget-maker may know all about widgets, the different sizes and colours, the various strengths and applications for widgets, and have many others skills and knowledge involved in widget making.

So why do you want to spend time away from widgets to have to learn how to use an accounting software program? Then you’ve got to learn where to allocate your sales invoices. Maybe you need to make up a template with your company logo to issue invoices from MYOB or Quickbooks to send to your customers.

Then you have to prepare any reports that are needed by your accountant to lodge your tax return. And what if you make a mistake when entering the data. If you are not experienced in bookkeeping, or have not used a book-keeper, then you could find that you either produce a set of accounts that are not a true reflection of your business, or you find that the bookkeeping figures do not balance.

Meanwhile, you’ve got yourself totally stressed out, and discovered that you’ve spent so much time on trying to be the bookkeeper in your business, that you’ve lost a couple of very valuable sales orders because you haven’t had time to make any widgets.

Your financial planner would probably suggest to you that you need to spend time and effort in your business making the money. Just as you’ve turned to a financial planner for guidance in your financial future, it makes sense to turn to a professional bookkeeping service that covers Yatala, Ormeau, Pimpama, and Beenleigh to look after your bookwork

By outsourcing a bookkeeper, do not feel that you will lose control of your finances. Indeed, in many cases the result is quite the opposite. By having your financials kept upto date by your bookkeeper, you can get regular reports, do month by month comparisons, and see if your business is heading north or south

Many small business owners will say, “Yes, but I leave all that to my accountant!” Well, that’s all well and good, but is your accountant basing decisions on current financial data, or is he looking at your bookkeeping figures from last year?

If your paperwork is in disarray, don’t panic!

Contact our bookkeeping service covering Yatala, Ormeau, Pimpama, and Beenleigh, and we can come in and tidy up the mess that has accumulated over the past few months.

Contact us for details

Do You Have Five Minutes to Expand Your Business?

Often our MYOB and QuickBooks bookkeeping clients around Yatala, Ormeau, Pimpama, and Beenleigh are so busy involved working in their business that they tell us, their bookkeepers, that they’ve no time to work on their business.

Here’s a simple habit that you can form and stick to everyday. Then watch the results. All you need is five minutes.

Can you find 5 minutes to at least one of these things to expand your business?

• Send a quick note / email to a prospect, colleague, friend or acquaintance.
• Invite a friend or business associate to lunch for next week – even if they cannot go, spend a few minutes “just catching up.”
• Scan the local paper and jot a little note of “Congrats” to someone you recognize.
• Have a look at your diary. Think of another opportunity to develop with a client you saw yesterday, then follow up with your client.
• Call someone whose project you’ll be starting in the next two weeks and tell them you’re looking forward to seeing or working with them again. Ask how they’ve been.

If you’re looking for some more ideas Contact us

Australian Government Reducing December Quarter PAYG by 20%

In an attempt to weather the global financial crises, The Australian Government is reducing by 20% the quarterly PAYG (Pay As You Go) instalment due for the December 2008 Quarter. If you make monthly payments, the PAYG is due on 21 January 2009, while most small businesses that report quarterly, this instalment is due on 28 February 2009

However, the information released by the ATO then adds a comment. Note that as the date falls on a long weekend in some states, the lodgement and payment deadline has been extended to 3 March 2009 Australia Wide)

You may have already received a letter from the Australian Taxation Office in relation to the December quarter PAYG reduction. Just be aware that it’s not a tax cut and it will all be adjusted at the end of the financial year

PS We are not registered Tax Agents and cannot give advise in such matters – Speak to you accountant to see how it affects you

We suggested she email us the MYOB data file, so that we could get a clearer understanding of where she was at with her bookwork. Contact us for details

She then admitted that there were two different data files being used in the office for the bookkeeping!

Here lies the problem: If you are working on the bookkeeping in one MYOB data file, and someone else is working on the bookkeeping in another data file for the same company at the same time, errors will arise – because MYOB is not designed to cater for that.

So we asked her to send us the other MYOB data file , and then we had to work out which file was the most current.

Often when clients around Ormeau, Yatala, Coomera, Eagleby and Beenleigh ask us to help them with their BAS (Business Activity Statements) the problem is not with the BAS. The problem lies with somewhere within the bookkeeping process during the BAS preparation. You know the saying GIGO – garbage-in, garbage-out! The actual completion of the BAS form is the easy part.

After all, if the figures do not balance, you can simply make a general journal entry to fix it all up – right? WRONG Contact us for details

PS The ATO advises that:” if you make monthly payments, the PAYG is due on 21 January 2009, while most small businesses that report quarterly, this instalment is due on 28 February 2009
Note that as the date falls on a long weekend in some states, the lodgement and payment deadline has been extended to 3 March 2009 Australia Wide)

We recently inspected a detached house around Robina that had been renovated and looked very presentable. So much so that the vendor had received a firm contract for a prospective purchaser, subject to a “Building and Pest” report.

To the casual observer, there were a couple of cracked tiles on the floor, and a few hairline cracks in the external render, but nothing of consequence. The home had recently been painted, and with the new bathroom and WC, this house was very presentable.

A good renovation can hide many sins

The downhill slope to the front bedroom was rather a worry. The Building Inspection revealed a fall in the slab of almost 100mm! But what was the cause? No matter, a local company had come forward and given a quote in excess of $30,000 to underpin the house and “jack up the slab” to the original floor level.

We are often asked to look at a client’s bookwork and see if it’s all in order

Often, as bookkeepers, we are asked to look at a client’s bookwork, as they’ve been carrying out the data entry themselves, and on the surface, the bookwork looks in order. There’ been a number of occasions where the person doing the bookeeping has found a few problems, and the figures don’t balance, so they make a few general Journal entries to “balance the books” and hope the problem will go away.

Well, maybe the problem does go away, but does it reveal the cause of the problem. And how do you , as the businesses owner, know that there wasn’t a problem in the first place, and the “cover-up” work that has been done to your books has fixed the problem?

The vendor of the recently renovated property has covered up all the cracks. The external face brickwork has been rendered. Inside the walls and ceilings have been freshly painted, so that everything looks very presentable. But what is hidden behind the render, how bad were the cracks that appeared in the brickwork?

It’s all very well to go and have the remedial work carried out, then slab raised, and some underpinning done to the house. But how would you know if that has fixed the problem, if you do not know the cause of the problem?

As bookkeepers, before we “fix up the bookwork” we like to go back to the source of the problem, and make any necessary adjustments whch often are as simple as an incorrect allocation, or an error in keying an amount or date.

Yes, the easiest and quickest solution is to make a journal entry and hide the mistake. Just as the vendor chose to render the external brickwork and hide the cracks- so that evrything looks just fine.

The crunch has come that now the home owner is wanting to sell, nobody can make a fair estimation of the cost of fixing up the subsiding slab problem.

We had an engineer come and inspect the property. This engineer is very experienced in handling subsidence cases. Indeed he’s doing extensive work in South East Queesland’s Collingwood Park, where many houses have suffered subsidence as a result of underground mining in the past.

What’s the true cost of this home renovation

We asked the engineer what he felt would be the true cost of this renovation. He shook his head, saying that if the home owner had got an engineer out to do a full report before any renovation work was undertaken, then they could look at the cause of the problem that had caused the slab to drop.

As the house stands, who knows what secrets are hidden behind the external render and internal painting. And without knowing the cause of the problem, who knows whether the remedial slab work and underpinning will do more good than harm.

Regardless of how much has been spent on the internal makeover of the house, the vendor is likely to face the consequences of his cover-up operation. He’ll either have to sell the house at a hefty loss, or hold onto the house and turn it into a rental property.

Any potential purchaser would be taking a huge risk in purchasing this property, because there are too many unknowns. In a market where there are some “easy bargains” who needs to buy such a headache? This truly is an example of a costly renovation.

For the retail trade, Christmas is always seen as an important time of year for their turnover. But what about the real message of Christmas. Remember this: Like it or not, Jesus is the reason for the season.

Walking around the Hyperdome Shopping centre, there has been some attempt at Christmas decorations by centre management. A few stores have the token Christmas tinsel draped across the ailes, or around the cash registry. But where is the “heart” of Christmas.

Has “political correctness” overshadowed the Christmas Spirit? Commercialism has certainly taken over for many. Gosh! The muslims may be offended if there’s too much “Christmas Cheer” – Well, actually, not if you go to Dubai! You’ll see a heap more Christmas decorations and evidence of Christmas Spirit in Dubai than you will in Robina this year.

Perhaps it’s just apathy. Let’s just blame it on the world financial crisis shall we? Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the NewBorn King

God Bless you Merry Gentlemen,
God bless the Master of this house
And Mis-ter-ess also;
God bless the little children
That round the table go;
God bless their friends and kindred,
That come from far and near;
May the Lord send a happy New Year,
Happy New Year,
May the Lord send a happy New Year.