Simple bookkeeping mistakes can become very costly, not only by incorrect allocations, but also in the time that’s spent tracking down the source of the errors.

Bookkeeping is a task that many business owners hate doing, and is often rushed, left to the last minute, or carried out late at night after a hard day at the office or on site. It’s time like that when the mistakes are made, and incorrect bookkeeping can expose owners to substantial fines if discovered by a Tax Office audit

Here’s a list of ten common mistakes made by small business owners in DIY bookkeeping

1. GST
This is still an area of confusion particularly for start-up businessess. We often see sole traders charging GST without being GST registered.

2. Claiming GST credits without realising that your supplier is not registered fo GST

3. Claiming GST without valid tax invoices

4. Not understanding the accounting software package

As accounting software packages are simplified by programmers, they seem to get more complicated for the end user. Many of the functions are confusing for the business owner who may have no understanding of double entry bookkeeping. This can lead to business owners doubling their work in an effort to create the desired reports, and therefore producing inaccurate bookkeeping records

5. Incorrectly allocating the data entry can result in missing valid tax deductions that should rightfully be claimed. Your accountant will generally not have time to go through each item, and may not fully understand your business. So if you’ve allocated data incorrectly, you r accountant may also miss those claimable items

6. Missing deadlines for Business Activity Statement (BAS) and PAYG lodgements

You could be subject to fines and penalty payments

7. Superannuation contributions -

Under the Superannuation Guarantee legislation, you are required to pay 9% of an employees ordinary time earnings – many small business owners are unsure what constitutes ordinary time

8. Bank reconciliations – many businesses do not understand the purpose of, or how to reconcile the bank account with the data entry – causing room for errors

9. Failing to issue invoices regularly

This can badly effect your cash flow, as well as leaving your business wide open to overdue debtors being overlooked

10. Backing Up your records

We’ve all experienced an inexplicable failing of our computer, be it a power surge or the hard drive just crashing – or even the computer being stolen. Where would you be if you’ve got no back up of your accounts?

You should make it a habit to back up every night, every week, and every month

Free Strategy Session
More importantly we’ll review your financials, and show you how to manage your cash flow, increase your income / revenue, and reduce your taxes.

Contact us today to book your appointment.

This doesn’t mean that all bookkeeping services also offer tax advice. By having an accurate set of books you are less likely to be paying the Government more than is absolutely necessary.

Having the bookkeeping done by professional bookkeepers lessens the chances of mistakes, and increases the chances that your accountant or tax agent can give you the best advice and guidance in terms of tax minimisation.

Your bookkeeper should be helping you account for every dollar that comes in and out of your business. There may be expenses that occured that you might have missed – so if your bookkeeper is diligent then it’s more than likely there’ll be additional expenses that you can claim for.

Miscellaneous expenditures can save a small business owner hundreds if not thousands of dollars in tax liabilities

Your bookkeeper should be recording all your financial transactions – so it’s up to your accountant to ensure that you are making a claim where ever you can. Your bookkeeper can only record day-to-day transactions based on your paperwork, so if you don’ have the documentary evidence, then you may miss out on opportunities to reduce your tax liabilities

Many small business owners do not keep up with ALL expenditures each month, so if record keeping is not a strength in your business, then let your bookkeeper know so that they can set up a system for you. Good record keeping is of paramount importance and can reduce your tax liability tremendously.

Get into the habit of keeping all your documentation and ensuring that it is delivered to your bookkeeper. It will more than pay for itself in the long run.

Free Strategy Session
More importantly we’ll review your financials, and show you how to manage your cash flow, increase your income / revenue, and reduce your taxes.

Contact us today to book your appointment.

Actually sports stars are too highly paid and should have their incomes reduced to the levels of CEOs.

There seems to be a large number of sports stars that seem to have no idea of the value, or maybe just how too handle the obscene amount of money they receive.

What ANZ CEO Phil Chronican may not appreciate is that the difference between sports stars and bank executives is that Sports stars add to the quality of people’s lives –

Banking executives BRING MISERY to people’s lives through the greed of the banks to make profits for their shareholders at the expense of their customers.

It’s hard to empathise with ANZ CEO Phil Chronican when there’s so many stories of hard working Aussies who have lost their jobs through BAD DECISIONS made by bankers around the world. They lost their jobs, can’t meet the repayments, and are thrown out of their homes. Meanwhile chief executives living in huge mansions say that they have to increase bank fees in a global financial crises while everyone else is having to reduce their fees and pay, just to keep working

ANZ CEO Phil Chronican, if you want to start entertaining Australian families and improving their quality of life like sports stars, then perhaps people will recognise that you may bring value to the end user and deserve to be paid more!!

Over twelve years ago when GST was introduced, the government were virtually forcing businesses to review the finances on a quarterly basis, leading to a greater attention to detail.

To simplify the process there’s been an increasing number of accounting software packages enter the market, with business owners being led to believe that they do their own bookkeeping.

Problems arise because owning the software does not make you a bookkeeper, and whilst the software companies have done their best to make the packages easy to use, the operator still needs a basic understanding of bookkeeping.

We’ve helped many small business owners with book-keeping, and we can help you.

Free Strategy Session
More importantly we’ll review your financials, and show you how to manage your cash flow, increase your income / revenue, and reduce your taxes.

Contact us today to book your appointment.

When clients tell us that they cannot find their MYOB data files, there’s normally quite a simple explanation, and there’s a checklist of things that we run through to work out when and how this may have happened.

How many times can we stress the importance of backing up your computer data files. A hard drive is not 100 % relaible all the time. We are not computer experts but we do know this. If your computer dies, the motherboard fails, or the hard drive dies witout notice, and you have no backup, then you’re in trouble.

If any of the above events occur and you do have a backup, then you’ll only have lost your bookkeeping information since your last backup.

One of the computer techies in the our local computer repair shop told us that they back up everything TWICE – they have two backups.

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
Samuel Butler

We’ve heard that old saying “love what you do for a living and you’ll never work a day in your life”. One secret to having a job is to make it have enough variety in it so you don’t go crazy. In other words don’t pick Watercress, pick food.

After having a business for more than 10 years there’s one thing that stares you in the face: if you do not like what you do for a living, you’re in big trouble.

Because, sooner or later, life itself will start to look (and feel) like a burden. It will feel like you “have” to do stuff, instead of just doing it. Because you like it. Because you know you can do this really good. Because you enjoy it.

Wouldn’t you like to wake up in the morning and be excited about your day? To do that you need to position yourself so that you like/love what you do – it has to be meaningful work.

Most people never look at other options – they have to pay bills and eat so they don’t have the ‘luxury’ of exploring their ‘creative’ side – and we are not brought up to believe that work should be fulfilling and useful. You have to live with yourself for the rest of your life – you should be picky about how you are going to spend every day of it!

Not everyone is a creative genius – if you turn your hobby into a business it needs to be more of an obsession than a hobby and business rules still apply. Be sure about what that passion really is – crocheting might be your hobby but actually you love being part of the group, sharing new designs, teaching… not the same thing at all! Look at why you do something.

I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.
Thomas A. Edison

You should enjoy getting up for your job each day. You should like the work you do and be so interested in it you think about it at night. You should like the people around you and you should never be doing anything you do not truly love and enjoy.

Kathy sent us an email: ” Hi. I’m located in the United States. I have a client who wants to transfer his books from MYOB to QB2009. I’ve had no luck finding a way to do it in the US. Can you do this? Would you take on a one-time job if I send you the backup file from MYOB, and finally, how much would you charge? His is a very tiny graphics design company; he can’t afford to pay too much, otherwise I would just re-enter everything for the last 15 months or so.”

It is possible to transfer from MYOB to Quickbooks, though not as straight forward as either company would have you believe.

The first point to consider is that the Australian versions of MYOB and Quickbooks are different from the USA versions. A basic difference is that our tax year runs 1 July – 30 June whereas the USA the fiscal year is from 1 October – 30 September apparently.

When transferring from MYOB to Quickbooks, you may consider the following:

1) You can transfer card files – suppliers customers etc very easily between MYOB and QB – ask us how if you don’t know

2) If you need detailed transactions recorded, i.e itemised invoices to be transferred, then that’s where the expense occurs

3) we suggest to clients that they start a new file on the new software at the beginning of the new financial year

4) If it’s only a small company with not much money then you could just do journal entries to get the balances upto date in the new file rather than re- enter all the previous data

We’ve not found a cheaper way to do it – we’ve looked at this problem many times before

There is a software program that costs around US $400 – then the time taken to extract the data from MYOB into the software and extract out into QB – not worth the time/trouble based on the budget – for what result?

How often would your client need to refer back to their previous MYOB files? Do they own the MYOB software, in which case they could still have it if/when they needed to refer to them?

Why not just refer back to the hard copies as /when required?

Contact us for help with How to transfer data from MYOB to Quickbooks

To understand the diffrence, we’ll talk about what happens when potential clients contact our bookkeeping service and ask us: “what is your hourly rate for bookkeeping?”

By ascertaining the price (the hourly rate) they naturally asume that will tell them the cost of outsourcing their bookkeeping.

They then try to make a comparison by phoning up other bookkeeping services in the belief that they can hunt around and find a bookkeeper charging a better rate and therefore make the assumption that by paying a lower rate for bookkeeping services they will save money.

On the surface, this may be a logical thought process. Mathematically, it‘s a simple equation: The job takes “X” hours @ “defined rate” = Total Cost of bookkeeping services.

Therefore by finding the lowest “defined rate” = You’ll lower the total cost of book-keeping.

However, there are a number of variables in this equation:

• How do you ascertain whether both bookkeepers will do the same amount in the allocated “x” hours?
• How do you know that the quality of work will be the same?

There may be a number of reasons why a bookkeeper is charging a lesser rate:
1) The bookkeeper needs the work
2) The book-keeper lacks experience / confidence
3) The bookkeeper does not know the true value of their service
4) The bookkeeper has lower overheads

The bookkeeping rate refers to the amount of money that consumers have to give up to acquire that bookkeeping service.

Whereas the Cost refers to the amount paid to produce that service.

The cost represents the sum of the value of the overheads – offices, labour, travel, experiences and expertise.

So when the client asks the hourly rate, do they really want to know how much the bookkeeping will cost? And if they focus on the COST, are they looking at bookkeeping fees being an expense or an investment into their business?

A bookkeeping expense could be the result of trying to save money on bookkeeping fees by engaging the cheapest bookkeeper who lacks experience and makes many mistakes

By investing in a bookkeeping service that has expertise, experience, and higher fees may produce better results for your business and ultimately save you time and money overall.

Next time you are “shopping around, consider the situation from a bookkeeping perspective, and remember there a difference between cost and price.

One of our bookkeeping clients that runs a gym WAS stuck in the same rut that so many small business owners get caught in. Too much time working in the business and no time to work on the business.

Whether you’re a personal trainer, run a gym, or you’re a mechanic with your own workshop in an industrial area, you’ll always need to spend some time bookkkeeping.

Turning your sole trader job (business) into a real business that runs whether you are there or not, means that you have to start freeing up your time and outsourcing.

A good place to start outsourcing is with your bookkeeping. For so many small business owners bookkeeping is a real drudge, it consumes your time, you feel frustrated, and in most cases you’re probably not even doing it correctly.

Regardless of keeping accurate financial records being a legal requirement, it’s also a vital factor in ensuring the success of your business.

Our Gym owner believes that for his business to succeed, he needs to fill his day with personal training clients, often back-to-back. This raises the questions of when does he have time to make his next sale, or do any marketing, or increase his gym memberships?

The crazy thing is that the personal training sessions that he takes are already paid for, and so while he’s working hard coaching his clients, he is doing nothing to increase his business or keep his cashflow turning over.

Until we suggested that he outsourced his bookkeeping, he had no idea why OR where he was losing money. When ever he had a big bill, he went and borrowed more money to pay that account.

Talk about being stuck on a treadmill, he was on the small-business-owner-mentality treadmill of running hard to stand still.

By outsourcing his bookkeeping:

• He was able to get a clearer picture of how his business was performing.
• He didn’t have to worry about paying his bills on time, or paying late fees
• He drastically reduced the amount of bank fees he was paying by being overdrawn and having bounced payment penalties
• He had an extra three or four hours a week to work on his business using skills that he ALREADY has rather than getting stressed and frustrated over doing the bookkeeping incorrectly
• He started to see the benefits of outsourcing, and has started looking at other areas of his business that he can outsource

Look at what work you do each day and each week, and ask yourself what would happen if you didn’t perform some of those tasks.

Then ask yourself if somebody else could do some of the things that your time is being absorbed in doing.

Our gym owner was wasting time going to the shops to buy stationery, milk, check the mail box, do the banking etc.

He was wasting time cleaning the bathroom, dusting and vacuuming the premises.

“But I’m saving money,” he explained.

Let’s just think about that. He’s charging his time out at over $50 per hour, and doing jobs that someone else could be doing at $15-$25 per hour.

You don’t need to be a bookkeeper to work out that not only is he wasting valuable time that could be used to build his business, it’s actually costing him money ( at least $30/hr) by NOT outsourcing.

This is just one example of how outsourcing jobs can help you cut down a huge amount on your expenses. By outsourcing tasks that other people can perform on your behalf, you will be able to attend to more important tasks in your business, which means that you will maximize efficiency and profit of your business.

The first step you can take to save money and run your business more efficiently, is to stop DIY bookkeeping and start outsourcing your bookkeeping jobs for your small business.

Contact BookkeepingTeam Pty Ltd for details

We’ve found bookkeeping clients that take a shoebox full of receipts and iinvoices to their accountant to complete their tax return. You can dramatically reduce your accountant’s bills by taking care of your own day-to-day finances.

Anything that you can do that will save them time, such as keeping your books in good shape, will save you money.

The simplest way to cut your accountancy bill is to have an efficient and easy system for your invoices receipts, bank and credit card statements.

Ever wondered why your accountants’ eyes light up when you present them with a shoebox full of dockets at the end of the financial year?

Ever thought that if businesses are outsourcing their bookwork, then why wouldn’t accountants?

Chances are your accountant is paying a bookkeeper to do most of your paperwork anyway, and taking a nice margin for the priviledge

The accountants will charge their time to you and pay bookkeepers rates to get the work done. So the accountant has just made a very nice profit from a business owner who desperately needs to tighten up business operating costs.

Do what your accountants are doing, and outsource your bookkeeping.

When it comes to GST and Business Activity Statement; Pay As You Go Tax, accounts receivable and payable, smart businesses turn to Gold Coast mobile bookeepers for their bookkeeping!

New clients soon discover we can save them money in accounting and Book keeping fees, since we provide a methodical, efficient service.

You may find cheaper rates elsewhere, you may find bookkeepers that charge higher rates. Ask yourself: “Am I getting value for money?”

Speak to any of our clients and you will soon learn that they are all more than satisfied with the high level of service that we provide.

So good are we, that we may train our clients to the extent that they no longer need us! Contact us today for help with your filing