Business Activity Statements BAS are due on 2 march 2010 for businesses that report their GST obligations quarterly

With the Christmas holiday period over for many small businesses, it’s time to get all your paperwork together and get it to your bookkeeper or outsourced bookkeeping service- to report on the 2nd quarter (1 September to 31 December 2009) to get your BAS lodged on time.

Maybe the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) does have a heart, after all. Rather than asking for lodgements on 28 January, they automatically give everyone an extension to the BAS lodgements to 28 February. This is, of course, a Sunday. However, the next business day is not Monday, since it’s a public holiday in Western Australia. Thus the Q2 BAS is due on 2 Mrach 2010

However, don’t be fooled by their grace, because there is NO WAY that they’ll consider granting an extension after that date. So you need to ensure that you have your Business Activity Statement lodged by 2 Mrach 2010

If you are struggling with your bookkeeping and need help, if you do not have a bookkeeper, or are looking to outsource to a mobile bookkeeping service, then contact us now

You may use MYOB or Quickbooks accounting software – or even some other syatem for your bookwork. We can assist you with any challenges, or even just releave you of the burden of the book-keeping

Our bookkeeping Service has clients in and around Cockburn, Melville, Fremantle, Canning Vale, and South Perth, Western Australia. Contact us here for details

Here are ten options to consider if you have failed to lodge your BAS for the reporting period 1 July 2009 – 30 September 2009:

Contact us (quickly) because we may be able to get an extension for your BAS

1) Bury your head in the sand and hope that the whole thing will go away

2) Have a panic attack and wonder what to do now you’ve missed the deadline

3) Shrug your shoulders and just accept the fact that you’ll be making a late lodgement of the BAS

4) Stay up all night sweating away trying to complete the BAS even though it’s going to be a late lodgement

5) Call the tax office (ATO) and tell them that your dog grabbed the BAS form and has buried it in the garden

6) Look through your pile of paperwork, because you remember seeing the Business Activity Statement somewhere, sometime whilst making a mental note that it had to be lodged by the end of October

7) Call your accountant and ask him / her what you should do next

8.) Do nothing, and just accept that fact that you’ll be fined for a late lodgment, and look forward to receiving fan mail from the ATO

9) Go to the fridge and grab a coldie, sit down and relax in frnt of the widescreen TV that Kev’s just help you buy

10) Contact us (quickly) because we may be able to get an extension for you, as well as getting all your documentation sorted out to help you ensure that you’re not going to be paying Kev07 more than you need, since he’s shown us all how good he is at spending all that money

A client contacted us yesterday asking us to supply them with MYOB Premier Enterprise for their franchise. It’s a “high-end” version of accounting plus – and comes with five single usr licences

This means that you can have five different users – in different locations, all access the one data file. It’s great for retail outlets – maybe a chain of shops linking back to head office.

The clients have a bookkeeper that’s going to come in and do their bookwork. What is surprising is the fact that the bookkeeper did not advise the client that they would need their own server – and possible an IT guy to come and help them get the system set-up.

Clients are looking for more than just a bookkeeper these days. Clients are looking for a bookkeeping service that will actually supply “customer service” – you know, the old fashioned type of service that was not just knowledge. It’s “service with a smile” service with “heart”.

If you want the “wham, bham, thank-you ma’am”, then there’s plenty of cowboy bookkeepers out there who’ll do the work for next to nothing, and more often give you no service, and heaps of headaches, a set of incorrect figures but at least you’ll have not paid much for your bookkeeping fees.

The December Quarter 2009 (Q2) Business Activity Statement is due on 3 MARCH 2009

If you’re hoping to get an extension, you’ve got buckleys as the Australian Taxation Office have already given you an extension from 28 January to 3 March.

Really, you’ve got an extension on the extension, since the ATO normally ask for the BAS lodgment to be submitted by 28 February, which this year falls on a Saturday,

If your chart of accounts is not set up correctly, or the allocations are incorrect, you could find yourself believing that you owe Wayne Swan far more than you need.

So the next business day would be 2 March 2009, except that we’ve got a public holiday here in Western Australia, so the ATO has moved the deadline to 3 March 2009

Do you need help with your BAS lodgment?
We get many frantic calls from clients who are struggling to complete their Business Activity Statements. The few weeks leading up to the BAS deadline can be very hectic for freelance bookkeepers

Our mobile bookkeepers can come to your premises, or even better, you can simply send us your data files and we can review your work, run a few reports and make sure that you’ve got all the figures in the correct allocations.

Business Activity Statements can appear daunting. What many small business owners do not realise is that the completion of the BAS form is not where the problems can be. Where the challenge may in fact be, is the fact that the data entry is not correct.

Maybe you’ve been down to your local computer supply store and bought your accounting software at a Hardly Normal Sale. You’ve rushed home and wacked the CD into your PC and then followed the prompts thinking that everything will fall rapidly into place

If your chart of accounts is not set up correctly, or the allocations are incorrect, you could find yourself believing that you owe Wayne Swan far more than you need. And rest assured, our illustrious Treasurer will soon find a way of spending other people’s money. He’s had many years of experience at that as a Trade Unionist

If you need help with your BAS, and don’t want to pay the ATO more than is absolutely necessary, then contact us right now so we can help you out

You could be sitting on the mountain at Bathurst listening to a Ford fan and a Holden fan having a debate about which car is better.

It seems you either love ‘em or you hate ‘em. The debate will continue forever

As a small business owner in and around Perth’s inner southern suburbs of Cockburn, Melville, Fremantle, Canning Vale, and South Perth, there’s advantages to MYOB as an accounting package; there’s functions that Quickbooks perform in a simpler matter.

Many small business owners in Perth’s southern suburbs hate doing their own bookkeeping

Contact our Fremantle bookkeeping service and let us show you how little it will cost to get your bookkeeping under control.

Perhaps MYOB have undertaken a more effective marketing campaign in Australia, and are more widely recognised.

Here’s some comments from independant users:
“For people with a bit of a technical / computer background I would suggest QuickBooks because it is more customizable and its reporting functions are much more powerful.

For those with less computer competency I would recommend MYOB Accounting Plus because it is easier to set up and entry of transactions is pretty straight forward. Probably harder to make mistakes than in QuickBooks. Premier is exactly the same except it allows more than one person to be in the data file at once. – I’m a full time accountant so I work with both of these programs daily”

OK, so MYOB is an Australian product and has good local support as well as uptake by accounting firms, etc. I think MYOB would be easier for the IT novice and Quickbooks seems more complex but I think that suits me. Quickbooks is also compatible with the time tracking tool I use on my PocketPC so that’s another tick in it’s favour. My accountant thinks both are fine

“QB just seems to make more sense to me coming from a technical background with some accounting understanding, whereas I run MYOB and fumble around a fair bit.

We started out using MYOB for an IT Shop I used to work at. We quickly moved over to Quickbooks because it was alot easier and there POS system was excellent with the barcode scanner and cash till. After that I still played around with MYOB and always found Quickbooks to be alot simplier to use. Although it looks hard QB is the better option for me.

“I think that accountants, book keepers and admin staff must like it for it’s workflow as a lot of my clients use it and most of the accountants I interviewed recently preferred it.”

Quickbooks is more friendly out of the box, but less logical from an accounting perspective. It has less reports. Its feature set is a little less.

“MYOB lacks Quickbookss help as you go feature – but I find that distracting anyway. With MYOB you really have to have an understanding of what you are doing. It is very easy to navigate MYOB. I find it harder with Quickbooks, but it is what you are used to.”

I use MYOB Premier and find it excellent and full featured, if a little clumsy to navigate around sometimes. It gives me the impression that the interface was never designed to have the expansive feature set behind it that it does, it’s a bit like walking down lots of narrow alleyways to get where you are going sometimes but it does work well.

“I’d give MYOB Premier an 8/10. Give me Attache or Syspro anyday though”

MYOB is useless if you want to run it over a network, especially with multiple users. We run a lot of weekly reports. Some of these can take up to 40mins to do.

Realistically, most of the problems with MYOB, Quickbooks – you name it is this: “People hate doing their books”, (So they shoot the messenger – so to speak) Programs like Quickbooks and MYOB are a blank slate that people use to mangle their books. And it is NOT the fault of the software, sometimes its the operator.

Contact our Fremantle bookkeeping service and let us show you how little it will cost to get your bookkeeping under control. Our team of bookkeepers cover all areas in and around Perth’s inner southern suburbs of Cockburn, Melville, Fremantle, Canning Vale, and South Perth, Western Australia

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 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)

Is a cheap bookkeeper cheap because they themselves do not value their work/worth?

We’ll save you time, the cheapest bookkeeper is probably one who is straight out of TAFE and has got a piece of paper to say that they can do bookkeeping. Maybe the cheapest bookkeeper has done a MYOB course, or a Quickbooks course. Contact us for more details

Maybe the cheapest bookkeeper is just “starting a bookkeeping business” and does not feel confident in “charging too much”

It seems that these days you can get a bookkeeper from $20 / hour upwards. We also know that there are bookkeepers offering “fixed-price” packages. Maybe they are the like the “Two Dollar Shops” of this world. They hope to be able to do a large number of clients’ books quickly at a low cost, and make a living based on turnover

Maybe the cheapest bookkeeper is a mother / wife / partner / father of a business owner, who’s being doing the bookwork for the family business for a few years and reckons that s/he could start his/her own bookkeeping business. S/he’s attracted to the idea of being able to drop the kids off at school, do a few hours bookkeeping, then pick the kids up from school.

Maybe the cheapest bookkeeper has recently left fulltime employment having worked in the accounts department of a large company and reckons that it can’t be that hard to run their own bookkeeping business. Even though they’ve never had to set up any bookkeeping systems, only done certain aspects of accounting, and always been able to go and ask the financial controller how to do something when there’s been a problem.

If you have little regard for your small business, then maybe a cheap bookkeeping service is just right for your business

Why does a cheap bookkeeper cost you money?
The same as a cheap car mechanic can cost you money, or a cheap carpenter, plumber, builder or lawyer. (Yes, we fell for that, using a cheap lawyer to do our conveyancing – it cost us a lot of money in the long run)

How do you know if your cheap bookkeeper is doing the right thing?
We had a call from a potential client asking how they could check up on their cheap bookkeeper. Here are some questions to ask of your bookkeeper … Bookkeeping checklist here

Do you value your business at all? Is your business just “a job” of which you are the boss and employee at the same time? We’ve talked about this before, and still we get calls from business owners shopping around for bookkeepers based on price.

How can I explain this: A cheap bookkeeper is cheap because they do not themselves value their work / worth. How would you feel knowing that the bookkeeper that you are contracting does not feel that s/he is competant enough to charge you a rate worthy of a good bookkeeper. How do you think that reflects on your business.

A cheap bookkeeper running the cheapest bookkeeping service may have cut their bookkeeping rates because they cannot find any work.
Have you thought that they cannot find any work because maybe they cannot get any referrals? Or they can pick up contracts and then after a few weeks they have to be let go.

Is the cheapest bookkeeeping service cheap because the bookkeeper has only little experience?
How would you feel to discover that you are paying for the training of your bookkeeper? You’ve made the choice to contract out your bookkeeping services and are being charged for a junior bookkeeper to do your bookkeeping!

Cheap bookkeepers are fantastic for our business.
Why is that? Because we get so many clients coming to us because their cheap bookkeeper has stuffed up the books. The problem with bookwork is that it’s not always possible to see where the mistakes have been made after the event. A simple mistake that might take two minutes, can result in detective work that takes three hours to rectify.

So your cheap bookkeeper has not only cost you their time, and then our time to correct their errors, but how much have you lost through other incorrect allocations.

We’ve had clients choose to take their bookkeeping to other bookkeepers only to come back to us because whilst our fees may have been higher, we actually showed them that they could get a bigger refund from the ATO, or they were not due to pay such a large amount of tax to the Australian Taxation Office. Contact us for more details

NOt all cheap bookkeepers are lousy bookkeepers
We are not saying that all bookkeepers who do not charge accordingly for their services are cheap bookkeepers. However, you need to consider the true value of your business and ponder about the economics of saving a few dollars on bookkeeping fees. If you have a cheap bookkeeper who is very good, then you need to considering increasing their hourly rates, and see what a difference it will make to your business.

No, we are not registered tax agents and cannot give advice in such matters. We are professional bookkeepers with many years of bookkeeping experience for clients from many different industries

With Christmas out of the way, and many small businesses returning to work, it’s time to get all your paperwork together and get it to your bookkeeper or outsourced bookkeeping service- to report on the 2nd quarter (1 September to 31 December 2008) to get your BAS lodged on time.

Maybe the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) does have a heart, after all. Rather than asking for lodgements on 28 January, they automatically give everyone an extension to the BAS lodgements to 28 February.

However, don’t be fooled by their grace, because there is NO WAY that they’ll consider granting an extension after that date. So you need to ensure that you have your Business Activity Statement lodged by 28 February 2009

If you are struggling and need help, if you do not have a bookkeeper, or are looking to outsource to a mobile bookkeeping service, then contact us now

Our bookkeeping Service has clients in and around Cockburn, Melville, Fremantle, Canning Vale, and South Perth, Western Australia. Contact us here for details

It’s like buying a car, but not being able to drive. When you learn to drive, do you really need to know how the car works, or how many revs, or where to put the oil in the car?

Most people just want to get in the car and drive – with a goal of getting from Fremantle to Melville (or wherever).

Most business owners do not have the time or the inclination to attend a MYOB course

Accounting software is much the same: you don’t need to know how it all works, you simply want to be able to enter invoices, receipts and spit out a few reports whenever required. That’s why many people contact us, and we teach them how to do the basics to learn MYOB for their business

Yes, you can go to TAFE and attend a MYOB training course if you so desire. Most business owners do not have the time or the inclination to attend a MYOB course. All they want is to know how to do the basics of bookkeeping to ensure they have a handle on their finances.

Smart business operators appreciate the benefits of outsourcing their bookkeeping requirements, so they’ll just do the minimum to keep on top of the bookwork, and have the bookkeeper can come in and do the rest. Contact us for details.

They can compare similar businesses and create reports showing “average” turnover for a particluar business, and then cross-check against the tax return / BAS lodgment of that business.

It would be a huge job to be a bookkeeper for the Australian Taxation Office. During 2006/07 the Australian Government collected $135billion from individuals, and paid out $17billion in tax refunds

It’s no surprise that the ATO has so many more resources now than in days gone by for extracting every tax dollar from individuals and small businesses.

As bookkeepers, it seems most days we are working for the Australian Taxation Office, yet being contracted to small businesses in and around Cockburn, Melville, Fremantle, Canning Vale, and South Perth area.

During the period 2006/07 the ATO collected $40billion in GST, so of course the ATO is going to be doing everything within its means to ensure that every tax dollar is accurately reported.

You may have a Car Wash business in Fremantle, or you may be an electrician in Cockburn, doing cash jobs. The ATO can make a reasonable estimate of your tax liabilities and then come along and audit your books.

If the records appear to be disorganised, it will take the ATO longer to look through them. The longer they take, the more they will see, and the more questions they will ask.

If you can present them with an organised and tidy bookkeeping system, they are less likely to ask too many questions.

Whether you use MYOB or Quickbooks, or maybe you do not have any accounting software or even any bookkeeping system in place, then contact us NOW for an initial FREE consultation