Money Moves to Make before 2020

We can easily get caught up in our daily routines and as long as we have money in the bank not focus on how we can be mindful and manage our money better. Here are 3 simple Money Moves you can make before 2020:

  1. Consolidate Your Super Funds. Did you know that super funds charge you fees just for having an account open with them? These fees are automatically deducted out of your super fund, which is why you may not have ever noticed them! Cut down on the number of super fund fees you pay by consolidating your super into one fund. Don’t know how many super funds you have? Log into MyGov and each of your super funds should be listed.
  2. Stop Paying Unnecessary Bank Fees. If your bank is is charging you bank fees for your every day accounts, switch to one that has no fees! It is a privilege for you to entrust your monies to a bank, and they should not be charging your excessive fees. There are plenty of bank account options out there that offer fee-free service.
  3. Track Your Spending. Most people are very aware of their fortnightly pay check amount coming into their bank account, but have you looked at where your money is going out to? Track your expenses with an app or even export your bank transactions into a software like Excel and categorise your spending transactions. I bet all those lunch dates over the course of a month will add up to an amount that is much higher than you expect! Becoming aware of where your money is going is the first step in managing it.

This is general advice and does not take into account your personal situation. For more info, visit ASIC’s Money Smart or consult your financial adviser.

Get PAID Faster Than Ever Before

Get PAID Faster Than Ever Before

Getting PAID is a challenge many business owners have – at all stages. As your business grows and expands, your needs will change, for many reasons. In this blog, we wanted to offer our tips for getting paid faster and reducing the need to chase your clients for unpaid invoices. Because I know y’all would love to spend less time chasing payment and just getting paid upfront, amirite?! 

One way to get paid faster is to look at the methods you accept for payment: services like Stripe, Square, Afterpay. Are you offering the options that your clients and customers need? Or is there a more popular method that you may need to look into, to get your customers to hit that ‘Pay Now’ button faster?  

Another hack that we use is to put the payment options on your quote – don’t put them only on your invoice. If you list all the payment options on your quote, people have an option to pay you earlier – whereas they may never have thought of that otherwise.  

Another way you can save time and get paid faster, is by setting up reminders to follow up from invoices. The invoicing software you use will often have this feature so that you don’t have to spend time doing it manually. Xero is great for doing just this – you can set terms of i.e. 7 days, and a reminder will be sent out after that time period. You can also add in specific terms such as “Interest will be charged after X days”, or “Late payment fees apply after x days”, to encourage clients to pay faster. If you haven’t covered your butt and ensured that this is your terms and conditions – at the end of the day all is this is, is a scare tactic without any follow up.  

While cash isn’t a common method of getting paid in many businesses, we had to mention it here – waiting for a meeting, or for cash to be paid can delay payment even longer. With the range of options for electronic funds transfers nowadays – we believe online payments are just a much more convenient option.  

We’ve also seen business owners who only invoice once the work is done – and this doesn’t have to be the case. Depending on the type of work, you can choose to invoice upfront, and request payment be made before you commence work. Many other businesses work off a 50% upfront and 50% on completion framework. Others offer payment plans to spread the cost out, and also reduce risk for both parties. All of these options increase your chances of getting paid faster. 

We’d love to hear your experiences and tips with these! Have you found any other methods for getting paid faster in your business? 

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© Diana Todd 2019 All Rights Reserved

Actionable Tips for Better Record Keeping in Your Business

Actionable Tips for Better Record Keeping in Your Business

Repeat after me: “a shoebox alone is not a solution”. Ok, look. I know lots of business owners do this – and it’s not the end of the world if that’s where all your receipts are stored right now. I’ve got a few tips up my sleeve to help you keep on top of them – and make tax time more about reviewing info, than spending hours going through your shoebox receipts. 

First up – have a think about the systems you currently have in your business. What’s working? What’s not working? If you don’t have a system for your records already, it’s time to create one! Trust me, it’ll make your life a whole lot easier and feel much more organised – which is a great feeling! Perhaps you already have a system in place, but is it effective and saving you time? Sometimes systems can end up creating more work – which completely defeats the purpose! Your goal should always be to streamline and get it done faster and easier. If it’s a hassle, you’ll procrastinate on doing it too – meaning a build up of work (read: a stack of accounting to do, come tax time 😉).   

One challenge we often see with clients is when business owners have a CRM, and an accounting system completely separate – and where these systems don’t speak to each other. In this scenario you’ll find that information is being duplicated and can get confusing – and instead of making life easier, you create extra work! So instead of just letting things go – take the time to evaluate what systems you have and if they are truly working in your business so that you don’t have extra to do later on. 

Another big thing to pay attention to is whether your CRM is setup for GST. Some that were created by international organisations may not account for GST, and this can also cause big issues down the track if your invoicing is not accurate. Even if you aren’t at the stage of charging GST just yet, it’s handy to know that your CRM can handle it so that you don’t need to change systems when you do get to this stage.  

Also a super important tip for record keeping in your business is keeping them for five years. These don’t have to be paper, they could be electronic. But, as a business owner you need to make sure you are keeping everything. That means, if you commit to taking photos of your receipts and load them into a system like Xero – it’s best if you do ALL of your receipts that way, rather than half and half.  

Our last tips for record keeping is our personal preference – use an app where you can take photos of your receipts rather than keeping paper copies. This way you can ensure that it’s always saved, even if you lose the paper copies – or if the ink fades! There are some great apps out there like Receipt Bank. If you do want to keep the paper copies as well – make sure they are stored in one place – like a shoebox or zip lock bag. Our final tip is to separate your records by financial year – and we mean when the invoice was PAID, not when it was raised.  

Phew! Implementing these steps will save you so much time and avoid headaches in the long run. Which will you start by doing next? 

The Customer Experience in Your Small Biz

The Customer Experience in Your Small Biz

What I want to say to you is that one thing that you can definitely do to grow your business is to think about the customer experience. A business’ purpose is to get and retain clients, right? As a business without customers, you will not be in business. So, getting new customers and retaining your existing customers should be pretty much the focus of all of your client interactions, and what these client interactions are called, collectively, is the customer experience.

What worked for us

One thing I have really tried to build solid at Balance Tax Accountants is a great customer experience from the beginning. I didn’t inherit a business, I didn’t buy a client list, I created it myself. I started it from just me getting clients and growing from there. I’ve really tried to create a great customer experience, and I did that by thinking about all the different touch-points that our business comes across when it comes to communicating with our customers.

Balance Tax Accountants offer services. A lot of our services are online, some are in person, but basically one of the biggest aspects of the customer experience is our presence on social media, because that’s where people like, comment, direct message us, and email. My team and I have put a lot of effort into ensuring that we have a consistent and easy customer experience. We want to be able to communicate with our clients in a way that is easy and meaningful to them.

How can you create a good customer experience?

I’m going to tell you a couple of things that we’ve implemented in Balance Tax Accountants.

A year ago, I thought we had a great customer experience, but then we grew pretty large, pretty quickly. And so, every once in a while, you’ve got to stop and reflect on where you’re at, are you still delivering a customer experience that is on the same level as where your business is at now? Are you still delivering a level of service that you are happy with as a business owner and that your customers are happy with?

1. We implemented feedback forms

After every piece of work, or every job, is completed, we now send our clients feedback forms where we ask them how we did. We ask our clients things like: how was the booking process? Did you find it easy? How about the process that we have for giving us information to be able to do the work? Did you find that easy? Do you have any helpful comments, thoughts? Any good, and bad things to say? Any feedback you would like to give us? Areas we can improve?

Implementing feedback forms is a really easy way to gauge how you’re doing with the customer experience because you’re asking your customers directly. There is no guessing. 

2. Scheduling Tools

We use a calendar for scheduling our client work. Whenever someone contacts us to book in work, if it’s recurring, then it’s scheduled in advance. We know the monthly work that happens and we have processes in place to make sure it happens the same for quarterly work. But let’s say things like tax returns, you only do those once a year, and you’re not necessarily going to do your tax returns the same month every single year – we have a process for this too.

 

3. Setting timelines, and beating them

One thing that we’ve done to improve the customer experience is when people contact us and want their tax return done, we ask for some information from them first. When they send it back to us, their job is scheduled in, and we notify them of the estimated wait time.

See what we’re doing? We’re hedging the client’s expectations of the turnaround of their work. The rule is that you always want to overestimate, so that way you under promise and over deliver. The worst thing you can do is over promise and under deliver, then the customer will feel start to feel impatient with you and loose confidence in your work.

But if we told them, “hey, your work is going to be done in about two weeks”. If we can get to it sooner than we will. When you deliver it to them a week and a half in advance they’re going to be like, “Oh, wow. I wasn’t expecting to get it until a couple of days from now. This is awesome.”

 

See how it’s so easy for you to kind of set your business up as the hero? So, those are just a couple of things that we’ve implemented in Balance Tax Accountants. Please have a think about the customer experience that you’re providing your customers, and what are some simple things that you can do to improve it.

 

Customer experience does not have to be expensive. The things we implement have not cost us another dollar at all.

 

Get creative and I’ll talk to you later!

 

– Diana Todd

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Oscar the tax bichon

© Diana Todd 2019 All Rights Reserved

Values & New Staff

Values & New Staff

A question you may be stuck asking yourself is when is the right time to hire staff? How do I find the right people to introduce to my business? Now, first of all, I think that it’s definitely an individual decision as the business owner about whether or not you want to grow and scale your business beyond yourself. If you do not want to become the manager of a team of people, then it’s completely fine, and you can have business success without involving anyone else, or maybe only involving an admin person, or a VA (Virtual Assistant).

If you are on the journey where you feel like you want to grow, then it’s time for you to decide what role you’re going to hire for, and then think about how you will find the right person or people to introduce into your business. When you’re a small business, it’s important to find people who are the right fit for the right roles. Yes, qualifications and experience are things that need to be considered when hiring but it’s not the only thing to be looking at.

One thing that’s not really talked about very much, especially in the small business world, is values. For me, I decided that Balance Tax Accountants needed a junior tax accountant. In the job ad for my industry, I knew that I had to make sure that my ad spoke to and reached the right people so that they would hear it, want to apply for it, and be a part of my team.

In the job ad for the junior tax accountant, I didn’t even mention qualifications and experience in more than one or two sentences. The job ad mainly talked about our values. What we do, why we do what we do, who we try to reach, and what makes us different. So our values are teamwork. I needed someone who loves to talk to and help other people. I needed someone who didn’t mind listening to other people’s issues and answering their questions. I needed someone who is flexible. Flexible to get the job done, but then also know that we have balance and that we are going to be rewarded for the hard work.

When you’re just starting out as a small business, you really need people who are flexible, and who are on board with the vision behind your business and what it is that you’re trying to do. You need employees who want to go on the journey with you and support you.

I’d be mindful of introducing other small business owners into your business as an employee. I think that contractors are definitely valuable, and have their time and place in business, but when it comes to employees, there’s a different mindset that contractors have versus employees. You want to hire people who are going to stick with you long-term and be invested in your business more than just a pay check. Therefore, you want to find employees who have similar values.

Now, when hiring employees, what do you look for? Obviously, skills, experience, and qualifications are definitely important when hiring for a new position but also are values. So, when hiring, you first need to identify your business values and those that you would want of your new employee.

 

Get creative and I’ll talk to you later!

 

– Diana Todd

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Oscar the tax bichon

© Diana Todd 2019 All Rights Reserved