Balanced Beans

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Balanced Beans Karen is a Registered BAS Agent with a career in bookkeeping spanning over 20 years. We genuinely care and want you to succeed!

Our team at Balanced Beans helps small to medium businesses in the Hunter Valley and Australia-wide manage their day-to-day bookkeeping, payroll, and taxation requirements. Brodie is a Chartered Accountant and Registered Tax Agent with over 17 years of experience in private practice and as a financial controller of privately owned enterprises. Together we are a formidable team who have all your accounting needs covered! Our services include Cloud Bookkeeping, New Business Set up & Rescue Work, Training & Support, Payroll including STP, BAS/IAS/TPAR, Tax Returns and Virtual CFO. Let us help you achieve a better work-life balance whilst meeting your compliance obligations.

Checking your bank account again won’t tell you how much you owe the ATO.You can finish work for the day and spend the e...
09/10/2026

Checking your bank account again won’t tell you how much you owe the ATO.

You can finish work for the day and spend the evening wondering whether you’ve put enough aside for tax, can cover the next payment or have missed something.

You’re away from your desk, but you’re still trying to work it all out in your head.

I see this with business owners who work hard and care about getting it right. They know what’s in the bank, but they’re less certain about how much of it is available to spend.

That uncertainty follows them home.

Keeping your bookkeeping up to date gives you a clearer picture of what’s coming in, what’s due and what you need to set aside.

You can see a shortfall earlier, ask questions and make a plan before a payment becomes urgent.

It won’t remove every pressure of running a business. But it gives you answers to some of the questions you’re carrying around after hours.

Your mental health is the biggest tax you’ll pay in small business. That’s why I talk about your wellbeing alongside your financial obligations.

Which question about your business finances keeps coming back after you’ve finished work?

The office was the part I thought I'd resent.Two years ago Balanced Beans stopped being a virtual business and moved int...
09/10/2026

The office was the part I thought I'd resent.

Two years ago Balanced Beans stopped being a virtual business and moved into a space in Maitland, and I went into it expecting to miss working on my own.

I'm an introvert. Running the practice from wherever I happened to be suited me fine, and being in a room with other people all day sounded like something I'd have to manage rather than something I'd like.

What I hadn't accounted for is how much of the job used to happen in writing.

A question that would have sat in someone's unread messages for half a day now gets answered straight away, because the person who needs the answer can see the person who has it.

The team can learn from hearing how someone handles a client call, then ask questions while it’s fresh. We can also deal with the small things as they come up, rather than saving them for a meeting.

I still need time on my own, and I’ve learnt to make room for that during the day. I start earlier than everyone else and walk along the river when I need a break, instead of waiting until Thursday to realise I’ve got nothing left.

Two years in, I’m glad we made the move. Working alongside the team has made running the practice easier, and I’ve learnt that being an introvert doesn’t mean I need to do it all on my own.

You can get an ABN in about fifteen minutes.But getting an ABN doesn't tell you what a BAS is, when it's due or what you...
09/10/2026

You can get an ABN in about fifteen minutes.

But getting an ABN doesn't tell you what a BAS is, when it's due or what you need to keep records of.

My honest opinion is that we set businesses up to fail this way. There's no education in school about any of it, so people fumble their way through and find out what they didn't know a long way down the track.

The ATO runs free, one-hour online masterclasses covering record keeping, GST, cash flow, hiring workers, business money and tax debt.

They're free and they're good.

They're also communicated so poorly that the business owners who'd benefit most don't know they exist, which is a shame, because that gap is exactly what they were built for.

What's the one thing you wish someone had told you in your first year of business?

Under the Tax Agent Services Act, anyone charging a fee to prepare or lodge your BAS has to be registered with the Tax P...
08/10/2026

Under the Tax Agent Services Act, anyone charging a fee to prepare or lodge your BAS has to be registered with the Tax Practitioners Board.

General bookkeeping sits outside that requirement, which is where the confusion starts, because the person doing both jobs often looks the same from the outside.

Registration means they have met a standard, they follow the Code of Professional Conduct, and they carry professional indemnity insurance that can compensate you if something goes wrong.

Four things to check:

1. Their TPB registration, searchable by name on the public register
2. The Registered tax practitioner symbol
3. That they carry professional indemnity insurance
4. That they never ask for your myGov login, which is not an approved lodgement channel for practitioners

That last one is the one people miss. The TPB has flagged unregistered preparers using client myGov accounts to lodge, and that puts your personal and financial affairs at risk.

If you would like us to take a look at your current setup before the next quarter, send us a message.

A 30% tax headline is a poor reason to restructure your trust.If your business runs through a discretionary trust, you m...
02/10/2026

A 30% tax headline is a poor reason to restructure your trust.

If your business runs through a discretionary trust, you may have seen the proposal for a 30% minimum tax on certain trusts from 1 July 2028.

It deserves your attention, but the legislation is still in draft and the detail is important. Treasury’s proposal includes exclusions, an option for some trusts to elect out and expanded roll over relief for those who choose to restructure.

Your trust was set up for a reason. Changing it could affect more than your tax bill, including how you hold assets, plan for succession and move money through the business.

So before you make a decision, find out why your current structure was chosen and whether the proposal would apply to you. Then talk through your options with your adviser as the legislation develops.

A headline can prompt the conversation, it shouldn’t make the decision.

Payday Super isn’t just a payroll change, it’s a cash flow test.Before 1 July, quarterly payments created distance betwe...
28/09/2026

Payday Super isn’t just a payroll change, it’s a cash flow test.

Before 1 July, quarterly payments created distance between paying wages and paying the super attached to them.

That gap has gone.

Super now generally needs to reach an employee's fund within seven business days of payday.

For employees, it’s a good change with their money reaching their super account sooner.

For employers, it makes the true cost of a pay run harder to ignore.

If the new timing creates cash flow pressure, the business needs a closer look at how employment costs have been built into its planning. The quarterly gap may have been doing more work than anyone realised.

Wages and super belong in the same cash flow decision.

Payday Super has made payroll more honest by showing the true cost of employing someone in every pay cycle.

From 1st October 2026, Australian businesses can no longer add a surcharge to eftpos, Visa, Mastercard or American Expre...
28/09/2026

From 1st October 2026, Australian businesses can no longer add a surcharge to eftpos, Visa, Mastercard or American Express payments.

The Reserve Bank has removed the rule that stopped card networks banning surcharges, and all four networks start their bans on the same date.

A few things the change does not cover: weekend and public holiday surcharges, booking fees and service fees, and the payment methods outside the RBA's remit such as BPAY, PayPal and buy now pay later.

What it does mean is that the merchant fee you have been passing on becomes a cost your business carries. A business taking $40,000 a month on card at 1.5% is absorbing around $600 a month from October.

Three ways businesses are covering the difference:

- Building the cost into list prices or hourly rates
- Absorbing it and taking the faster settlement
- Offering direct debit or PayTo, which generally cost less than cards

Three months of merchant statements will tell you what your number is and it takes about ten minutes to work out.

At the start of this quarter, I set a goal that felt counterintuitive.I wanted fewer clients.The goal was to grow revenu...
25/09/2026

At the start of this quarter, I set a goal that felt counterintuitive.

I wanted fewer clients.

The goal was to grow revenue by doing deeper work with the right clients and charging properly for it, rather than filling every gap in the calendar.

That has meant direct conversations about pricing, recognising that some clients need a different level of service and being more deliberate about how we use the capacity we have.

The hardest part has been ending long client relationships.

You get attached to people you've worked with for years. That doesn't make the decision wrong, but it can make it easier to delay.

I put some of those conversations off for two months. I'm getting better at being clear about where the practice is going and who we're best placed to work with.

I used to think growth meant adding more clients. This quarter has made me look more closely at revenue, capacity and the level of work we want to deliver together.

A client told me she felt like a failure because she was closing her business.The numbers had stopped working and contin...
21/09/2026

A client told me she felt like a failure because she was closing her business.

The numbers had stopped working and continuing was no longer viable, so I referred her to an insolvency practitioner to guide her through the process.

Along the way, her situation was described as small. In professional terms, that made sense because the amount involved was low compared with the matters the practitioner usually handled. But nothing about it felt small to her.

I called her because the process was dealing with the numbers, but nobody had spoken about what closing the business was doing to her.

When a business closes, we count the debts, write offs and shortfall, but not what the process takes out of the person going through it.

She had made a difficult but responsible decision before the situation became worse. I wanted her to understand that making that decision did not make her a failure.

Professional advice matters, but so does how we speak to people while they are going through it.

If you’re facing this now, get clear advice early. Choosing to stop can be the most responsible decision available, even when it does not feel that way.

People leave our first meeting with something, whether they sign or not.That matters to us.An initial conversation is no...
10/09/2026

People leave our first meeting with something, whether they sign or not.

That matters to us.

An initial conversation is not only about deciding whether we are the right fit for each other.

It’s a chance to understand what is happening in the business, where the pressure is coming from and what might need attention first.

Sometimes that means someone leaves with a question they hadn’t considered, or a clearer way of looking at their bookkeeping, BAS or how their numbers are being managed.

Other times, it’s simply knowing what they need to ask next.

We don’t hold back advice until someone becomes a client, because we’d rather you leave the conversation with more clarity than you arrived with.

And if we’re the right fit to keep working together, we’ll talk through what that could look like.

If your bookkeeping or BAS has started to feel harder to stay on top of, get in touch with the team.

Address

Maitland, NSW

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 4pm
Tuesday 9am - 4pm
Wednesday 9am - 4pm
Thursday 9am - 4pm
Friday 9am - 4pm

Telephone

+61240461000

Website

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