Once the integration is set up, Vend will automatically send daily sales, account sales, payment totals, and stock orders from Vend to Xero.
The integration allows retailers and their financial advisors to reconcile payment deposits in retailer’s bank account each day with sales totals and payment totals from Vend. You can also match payments made to suppliers against stock order invoices, and payments from invoiced customers against their account sales.
Sales, posted stock purchases and payments will all be reflected in balance sheets and P&L in Xero.
This article contains a number of relevant Australian tax updates for people who own real estate investments. Your tax accountant should be aware of these, but as an property investor it’s good to know what tax dedications and available and how they may affect your tax situation.
Claim 100% for this year or depreciate?
Taxpayers are entitled to claim the cost of repairs and maintenance immediately, but there are other adjustments to a property which are classified as ‘capital works’ and can only be claimed over a number of years.
“For example, if the guttering on your property is damaged in a storm, and you replace the part that is damaged, you can deduct that immediately,” says Karen Foat, Assistant commissioner at the ATO.
“However, if you replace the whole guttering, that’s a capital works, it’s a structural improvement. And you can claim that at a rate of 2.5 per cent for 40 years,” she said.
Source: Accountants Daily sister publication, Smart Property Investment, December 2018.
Whilst there is a good opportunity to provide bookkeeping and accounting services to business owners, building your own bookkeeping business comes with it’s challenges. There is high competition amongst existing bookkeepers and accountants for clients.
So what are your best options for buying or starting your own bookkeeping business in Australia?
You generally have three options:
1) Start your own solo business
A bookkeeper may have some contacts and get a bit of work from them, but usually solo bookkeepers find it difficult to attract new clients outside their few contacts. Hence the business generates a low amount of revenue and usually doesn’t grow over time.
Pros: Low startup costs Cons: Very challenging to get a number of new clients once existing contacts have provided some initial clients. Difficult to build a full-time income. Limited resources. In business by yourself (no one helps you).
2) Buy an existing bookkeeping business with clients
Overall, Australia wide, the going rate is $1 for $1 revenue. So a $70k annual revenue bookkeeping or accounting business is valued at $70k (or more).
Pros: Start immediately with client work. Cons: High cost. You have to pay the seller 100% of the purchase price up-front ($70k, $100k, etc.). You may need to borrow the money from a bank and pay interest. No guarantee those clients will stay with you after 12 months. High risk.
This business was sold at $82,000 for $71,280 turnover (annual revenue). Even though this business sale example is in QLD most bookkeeping businesses are similarly priced. Click on the link above to see other bookkeeping businesses being offered for sale in different states.
3a) Join a bookkeeping franchise business, like First Class Accounts
Pros: Professional training and image Cons: Initial fee from $30k (no clients provided for this fee). You have to market yourself to find clients at your own time and cost. Usually have to travel and pay accommodation in Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne for a week or longer for the franchise training.
3b) Join the Axia Accounts bookkeeping franchise business
Pros:
Low initial investment (under $8k)
Professional training and image
Includes MYOB and Xero training
Work Guarantee – clients provided
Local training in Perth (for Perth franchisees) and local training in Sydney (for Sydney franchises).
Cons: Must have some bookkeeping experience.
Clients are provided to Axia franchisees via our Work Guarantee program. Here is an Axia Accounts franchisee at the office of a new provided client…
For more information about the Axia Accounts or Axia Accounting franchise system, contact Mark Fregnan on phone: 0403 008 916 or via email.
Here are some useful links to news on Australian bookkeeping software and bookkeeping tips for 2018.
The most popular systems used by Australian businesses include Xero, MYOB Essentials (cloud), MYOB AccountRight, QuickBooks (QBO) and SageOne (cloud).
Bookkeeping software pricing (in Australia)
The monthly subscription pricing to those bookkeeping systems seems to change very often – they are all in massive competition with each other to win market share. So it’s useful to check their latest pricing, especially if the business has payroll requirements:
I noticed that the ordinary QBO bank feed can sometimes feed in the same transactions twice (on different dates). If you or your client clicks to [Add] these all in over time, the duplicate transactions will throw off your bank reconciliations, so look out for this. I think the direct feeds will be more accurate and hopefully will reduce the duplicate transactions in QBO.
THIS A HUGE MINDSET BREAKTHROUGH and one of my favourites.
From my research, Stephen Covey first coined “…begin with the end in mind”. What does this mean exactly?
Well, during my time as a business coach at Kinetic for over 11 years now I was amazed to see so few business owners having any specific plans for growth. It was always, “…it would be great to get our turnover to X figure”. Being non-specific and not detailed as a plan, it was often never achieved for them.
It then became one of my most important tasks to help them define achievable business goals with a concrete, well-detailed plan to get there.
Being almost the new year you can certainly take Ryan Allis and Stephen Covey’s advice to begin 2017 with the “end in mind”!
Okay so either you have a problem with a particular invoice, either it’s:
A duplicate invoice
An invoice that will not be paid by the customer (for various reasons) or
You chose to cancel the invoice (you gave the service or product to the customer instead of them paying it)
As it is good business practice to keep a complete record of all transactions, invoices (and their numbers) should also be retained. Because of this, it’s better to void invoices instead of deleting them.
If you delete the invoice then someone at some point will say “What happened to invoice #1234?”.
If they were able to lookup invoice #1234 and see that it has been voided, preferably with a note to say why it was voided, that’s better than having a completely missing record.
If you’ve already received payment against that invoice, don’t void the invoice. Instead, issue a credit memo or a refund to adjust the transaction.
There are three main ways a business owner can be paid:
1) Draw from the business bank account. This is treated as a loan and interest needs to be paid back to the business.
2) Draw from the business bank account in the form of shareholder dividends. The business owner then pays tax on the dividends.
3) Get paid as an employee of the business, like any other employee.
Option 1 (as above) – “In Australia, this strategy is viewed as the shareholder taking a loan against the company and results in the ‘loan’ being treated as unfranked dividends. The shareholder pays tax on the amounts withdrawn at their applicable tax rate. Find out more about unfranked dividends on the ATO’s website. Drawing up a formal loan agreement will help you avoid this pesky unfranked dividend situation, but you’ll have to pay interest back to your company and you’ll still pay tax on the cash – just over a longer period.”
Option 2 (as above) – “… shareholder dividends, which means you’ll need to declare the dividend as income and pay tax on the gross value of the dividend at its tax bracket. A franking credit can also decrease the tax payable on dividends by 30%. However, extra tax may be payable on benefits, such as the Medicare levy, depending on which marginal tax rate the owner is paying. In the event the owner ends up paying an income tax bill (instead of having their tax paid through the company), they have to pay PAYG instalments tax.”
Here’s how a new automation feature will give you a great business cashflow boost.
One of the most important accounts procedures which is crucial to most businesses (except retail) is to get your invoices out on time.
For example, you do a job today which ideally means your invoice should go out today.
Or maybe you bill clients a set fee every month where your invoices need to go out on time too.
Late invoicing
You may offer 7 or 14 days terms with you which means payment will be delayed up to that amount of time so invoicing late puts more strain on your cash-flow position.
Moral of the story – invoice on the same day.
Okay, we get it – but why is this a problem?
Answer: Our time!
We have the best intentions to invoice on the day but we often have other constraints on our time.
Well, if you’re not using this already, there is a great solution if you invoice frequent fixed amounts to some of your clients.
Automatic invoicing
So, say for example you have a number of clients that you invoice on the 1st of every month.
I actually have 16 such clients. It takes one and half hours a month to create the invoices and email them to each client.
My bookkeeper used to do this at a cost to me for $75 per month + gst. And they would have to come in on the 1st of every month.
Now with automatic invoicing available in most cloud-based accounting packages like MYOB, Xero and Quickbooks I am able to automate the creation and sending of these emails.
(Above is how you setup automatic invoicing in Xero called a “repeating invoice”)
(Above is how you setup automatic invoicing in Quickbooks called a “recurring invoice”)
Overall, here are the benefits of implementing automatic invoicing:
One and half hours saved each month for a cost of $75 p/m + gst or $900 +gst annual saving
No need for my bookkeeper to come in on a set day every month
Improves my business cashflow as the invoices go out on-time.
If you have fixed client billing you can do this too.
By the way, this is a cloud accounting software benefit as the automatic invoicing occurs in the background even if you don’t log in or go to the office.
Ask your bookkeeper to set this up for you or call us at Axia Accounts and one of our mobile bookkeepers can assist with this.
Starter
Payroll for one. Limited to 5 invoices and bills.
Reconcile 20 bank transactions
(only for a micro business or managing an investment fund)
$25 p/m
