Balanced Beans

Honestly, recruiting has been one of the more humbling parts of running a business.

I think most business owners can vouch for me here.

We recently advertised a role and out of everyone who came through, there was one person worth interviewing. One.

A lot of them never replied. A few wanted to know what it paid before they would have a conversation at all, which fair enough and then somebody wanted $90K with no experience behind them, which I'm still in disbelief weeks later 😅

And look, I'm not having a go at anyone for asking what a job pays, because you should ask. What doesn’t sit well with me is how few people were interested at all.

The industry is ageing. The people in it are heading towards retirement and there's not much following along behind them, especially locally.

But we can't keep saying the industry needs new people and then act surprised when hardly anybody puts their hand up.

I've said for a while that I want to help change that, because I do love this work and I want the next generation to see what this industry can offer them.

I'm working on something about it, slowly but surely, so keep an eye out for more updates.

Four things to have ready before TPAR lands tomorrow.

If you’re not familiar, it covers building and construction, cleaning, courier or road freight, IT and investigation and security services.

For every contractor you paid, you need their ABN, their name, their address, and the gross amount you paid them across the year including GST.

The ones scrambling tomorrow are usually the ones who paid different contractors for small jobs and never collected the details.

If that sounds like you, work through your payments as soon as possible, because chasing an ABN out of somebody who did one day of work for you in November takes a great deal longer than you would think.

If you’re not sure whether this applies to you, reach out to the team.

The Balanced Beans team is excited to attend and support this great event! We'd love to see you there.

A great big Happy Birthday to Ava 🥳🧁

Wishing you a great day! Thank you for everything you bring to our Team- we are lucky to have you 💜✨

Gloucester's chamber of commerce has closed and Dungog votes next month on whether theirs continues.

There are others sitting in the same position and I don’t think many people outside of business circles have noticed.

The same handful of volunteers have carried these organisations for years. Everyone else is too stretched to put their hand up and those few can only do it for so long.

After years of volunteering, I’ve recently stepped back from my own commitments because I couldn’t give them what they deserved while growing a business.

What gets lost when a chamber closes isn’t obvious until it’s gone. The advocacy for the town, the referrals that are shared between local businesses, somewhere a new business owner can meet others.

For regional towns that isn’t a small loss.

There's a point in a business where the limit on how far it can grow is you.

I hit that this year. We took on a lot of new clients, we grew faster than I expected and I was still doing the work I had done since the beginning because it was quicker to do it myself than to train someone else (or so I told myself).

What I’ve learned is that being the person who does everything is not the same as running a business, and at a certain size it stops being a strength and turns into the ceiling.

It comes down to having a loyal team who care about the client experience. They've taken on the work I used to and letting go didn’t come naturally to me.

But I know my clients are in good hands. Balanced Beans has grown bigger than I imagined it would and that's comes down to the people in it.

If you're the bottleneck in your own business, the sooner you admit it the sooner it changes.

GST free sales still count towards the registration threshold.

We had a conversation recently with a business owner who was certain they didn’t need to register for GST, because everything they sell is GST free.

The test for registration is your GST turnover, not whether the things you sell attract GST. GST turnover counts your taxable sales and your GST free sales together, and once it reaches $75,000 you’re required to register, even where every single sale you make is GST free.

Businesses making GST free supplies are often the ones best placed to claim GST credits on what they buy. Staying unregistered can cost them twice, first in credits they never claimed and then in the tidying up when it’s corrected.

We see this most often in health, food and some NDIS related services.

If you’ve been told that GST free means out of scope, I would be having the conversation before it turns into a bigger fix.

https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/gst-excise-and-indirect-taxes/gst/registering-for-gst

A client of another practice came to me last month.

They were ready to move on and wanted us to take them on which could have been an easy yes.

But I know the practice and the people they were with and it didn’t sit right with me.

So I told them that honestly. I said the relationship I have with that practice is more important to me than taking on their work and that the better thing would be to go back and have the conversation they hadn’t had.

A week or so later a card and flowers turned up from that practice, thanking me for the way I handled it and gosh, that one hit all the feels.

I have thought about it a fair bit since. Relationships in this industry mean more to me than a quick win and they have been for as long as I have been doing this.

If you pay yourself or a family member through payroll, your single touch payroll finalisation date is different.

Directors, family members and beneficiaries paid through the payroll are closely held payees and they sit under different finalisation dates to everybody else.

If you have a mix of closely held payees and ordinary employees, your closely held finalisation is due on the 30th of September and your other employees were due on the 14th of July.

If everyone on your payroll is closely held, which is a lot of family businesses, you have until the due date of that person's own tax return.

Two things go wrong with this every year.

1. People who never knew there was a later date at all.
2. People who knew and finalised without checking that the year's reporting matched what was paid.

Until it’s finalised, the income statement sits as not tax ready and the return waits behind it.

If you lodge your own, go back through the year before you finalise. You'd much rather find it now than have the ATO find it for you.

https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/hiring-and-paying-your-workers/single-touch-payroll/concessional-reporting/closely-held-payees

We get a version of this call every few months.

A business owner finds a bookkeeper at half the going rate and it works fine for a while. The reports look tidy and the BAS gets lodged.

Then something forces a closer look, usually a finance application or a change of accountant or an ATO query, and it turns out the year was a mess.

GST claimed where there was none, personal spending run through as a business expense, transactions coded to whatever seemed close enough, and bank accounts that have never been matched off.

Fixing it is not tidying up, we rebuild the year from source documents, work out which errors can be corrected on the next BAS and which need the original period revised, and then find out whether there is a shortfall to pay.

That work is slower and more expensive than doing it properly the first time.

You don't save the money, you defer it.

None of this means expensive equals good. Plenty of registered agents charge fairly, but price on its own tells you almost nothing and it is the easiest thing to compare, so it ends up being the only thing people compare.