If you are a tradesman (or woman) or owner of a trades & services business you probably work hard, work long hours and spend most of your time out of your office or home.
Then on top of that you have to worry about your cash flow, giving quotes, invoicing and collecting payment, costing and scheduling, progress payments, retention, variations, and often managing and paying subcontractors.
And of course you need to make a decent profit – or what’s the point?
If that’s not enough hassle, you have to think about your BAS, GST, PAYG tax and superannuation, not to mention dealing with the ATO, ASIC and other regulatory authorities.
We work with a lot of tradies. Before they came to us many of them struggled to meet their legal obligations and were fined or had other problems with the ATO. Many of them were simply paying too much tax.
Talking of tax, the ATO has implemented “benchmarking” for various trades. This means they’ve calculated what they think your gross and net profit should be depending on your size – and if you stray outside these arbitrary guidelines you’re a likely contender for a tax audit. And trust me, you want to avoid that if you possibly can. And if the ATO does target you, you need a friendly and very experienced accountant on your side to guide you through it.
We understand the trades and the unique issues you have with things like;
- Meeting your legal obligations and deadlines so you don’t come under the ATO’s radar
- Making full use of the various allowances;
- Motor vehicle expenses
- Clothing
- Tools of trade
- Mobile phones, etc.
- Not exceeding allowances and getting them knocked back (or getting fined)
- Having the right insurance
- Picking software that you’re comfortable using
- Keeping tax to a minimum while keeping out of trouble with the ATO
- Receipts, record keeping and so on
- Making a decent living
We’re based in Castle Hill and you can speak directly to the person who’ll be advising you and looking after our accounts whenever you want – either on the phone or face to face. We speak plain English, not accounting jargon, and our goal is simple – to help your business to succeed and to make your life easy so you can focus on looking after your customer rather than messing about with your accounts.
We’re all are Chartered Accountants (that’s as high as you get in accounting – a bit like a professor in a hospital) but what’s more important is that we are all experienced in helping all kinds of tradies.
Call us now to see how we can help your trades & services business grow.