Getting organised with your Payroll systems

In these “challenging economic times” some businesses see it as an opportunity to focus on ways in which to operate their business with even greater efficiency, taking time to “sharpen the axe”. One such way, which can bring immediate benefit is to look at how you process the handling of your payroll (and all of the associated) obligations within your business.

Whilst many businesses have moved in the direction of automating the production of staff payments and the producing of the payment summary at the end of the year, we find that there are still many opportunities for refinement of these systems. The following list is just some of the functions that a well organized payroll system can provide, which has immediate benefit of saving administrative time in your business and also ensure that you are covering all of the payroll bases to minimize any exposure the business (and you) may have in relation to your legal obligations when it comes to employing staff.

Your current system should be able to provide you with an immediate snapshot as to where you are up to with all of your payroll obligations, such as;

• How much do you  owe the Governments (Payroll and PAG withholding Taxes)
• The current status of your leave entitlements for all employees (Long Service Leave, Personal Leave, Annual Leave, RDO’s etc)
• Would you be able to calculate and produce an Employee Termination Payments (ETP’s) if required
• Are your Pay Slips complying and contain all of the necessary information to satisfy an industrial relations audit?
• Are your annual Payment Summaries produced electronically, with the annual reconciliation sent to the ATO electronically
• Can you allocate your employment costs between various divisions within your business automatically
• Is your system setup to handle Superannuation Choice, including all of the various Superannuation Compliance, Reporting and Payment obligations
• Can you produce information to complete your Annual Workers Comp declaration at the touch of a button (potentially reporting on information across multiple financial years)
• Are you able to Email Pay Slips and Payment Summaries direct to your employees
• Are you performing a full Reconciliation of payroll records to your General Ledger system and BAS on a regular basis
• Are you taking advantage of paying your employees (and their super funds) Electronically – directly out of your payroll system – this may also include the splitting of pays to multiple bank accounts for your staff
• Do you have Salary Sacrifice (calculation & Payment and reporting) requirements that are setup correctly
• Is your payroll information feeding automatically to your BAS & IAS forms when required
• Does your payroll system further track information that can assist you with your OHS / Workcover compliance
• If you charge your employees time for jobs – is this process automated so as to ensure that no time is missed being tracked to a job
• Plus much much more

Whilst this list contains just some of the functions that can be simply implemented into a small business, and even if you think the answer is yes to all of these it still could be worthwhile to check – just in case there is an opportunity for improvement in your business.

We have seen many situations where a small investment into your business systems in this area of payroll pays off many times over.

An effective payroll system is one that is accurately installed and setup, one in which your staff are fully trained and supported in. 

Article Contributed by Clayton Oates from QA Business
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The Circle of Price

 Why you need to charge what you’re worth, when growing a bookkeeping business!

I was mentoring a bookkeeper this week who was complaining that her clients didn't value her so I asked her what she was charging? She said old clients were $40 per hour and new clients $50. There were two problems. Firstly she is a Registered BAS Agent, has the required PI Insurance, undertakes ongoing professional development and provides her clients with reliable information so obviously wasn't charging what she was worth. And secondly we'd had this discussion about a year ago but she didn't put up her prices then! You've heard me harp on about getting paid what you're worth and by the end of our chat I think the message finally got through to her. 

If you need convincing that you should get paid what you’re worth you might be interested to hear what Dr Greg Chapman, MBA and Director of Empower Business Solutions calls 'The Circle of Price'.

 

 I love his simple explanation:

1. The more you charge, the more you are respected.
2. The more you are respected, the more your clients comply with your recommendations.
3. The more they comply, the better the results they get.
4. The more results they get, the more clients you get.
5. The more clients you get, the more you charge.
6. The more you charge, the more you are respected.

Perhaps when you first met your client they were a “rescue job” and you used your expertise to tame the bookkeeping monster and they are finally feeling in control and you’re empowering them around their finances by giving them reliable information to enable them to make strategic decisions about their business. You’re providing them with five star service and an integral part of their team. What value do you think that has for your client? Are you charging enough for it?

Article contributed by Debbie Roberts from Pure Bookkeeping

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Tough times - are they an Opportunity?

Whilst there is no denying that we live in interesting times and arguably some of the most challenging for decades, it is interesting to observe how people handle the same situation differently in their business.

We have seen a pattern developing of two distinct responses to the current situation from business owners and operators, and a lot of the reaction has to do with how you see the present times – either as a threat to the very existence of your business or as an opportunity to work diligently on your business and design an enduring positive outcome.

Some businesses have adopted the victim approach and then turn on the very people that have helped them operate their business successfully to date, their customers and suppliers and even their staff, there is a sense of frustration of not being able to control that which is uncontrollable - such as the broader economy.

Whereas on the other hand we have seen a very proactive approach with comments such as “This is the perfect time to refine our processes so we are ready to take advantage of the good times when they roll around again”

Whilst much of this initial response is driven by an attitude, there are certain tangible actions that could assist you in your quest to design a positive business future.

So how can technology help – well one of the first things to do is to identify those areas of the business (if it can be improved) that will bring the greatest benefit (both now and in the future). This could be done via a simple Business Systems Audit, by taking a close look at “the way you do things around here”. Do this with a critical eye and don’t settle for second best, this is the time to invest in your business so it is well positioned to take advantage of the turnaround when it occurs.

Some questions to ask could include; -

• Which systems do I currently have in place? And are they working efficiently? 
• What are we currently doing manually that could be automated? (e.g. Invoicing Purchase Orders / Sales Orders / Quotes / Payroll / Timesheets / Financial Reporting etc)
• What are the most successful businesses in our industry doing?
• Would we benefit from having systems that allow staff or management flexible access to the office (E.g. working from home via remote access)?
• Are our business systems and processes fully documented allowing for easy replication when needed?
• How do we look after our customers differently from our competitors? Consider implementing a fully automated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that allows you to cultivate relationships with both existing and prospective customers
• Am I receiving reliable and timely information on key business drivers such as profitability, tax obligations, budgeted performance, short to medium term cashflow forecasts, etc?
• Are our business systems fully safeguarded from loss with multiple backup routines, including offsite / online automated backup systems?

Whilst this is by no means an exhaustive list, it is a start, and that is one of the keys to success – beginning!
This process is one of constant improvement and questioning. A good idea is to take time out to look at your business as though you were to buy it from you, in its current form. Would you judge it to be a good investment? If not then set some time and resources aside to invest in those areas that will help place it in a position of strength for the future.

Article Contributed by Clayton Oates from QA Business

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2013 – The Year that Worked

Are you working for you? Or in spite of you?
 
How many of your new years resolutions have worked for you? How many have not?

Around the beginning of each new year, a tidal wave of choice and opportunities to change the way we can live life washes up against our front doors, surfs down our broadband connections and swamps our inboxes. Lifestyle gurus and their best buddies, technology firms, often appear to be pushing us toward using their tools, to live life their way. “Listen to what I have to say...It changed my life...aye, aye...” 

Don’t take it personally - "I-gurus" (as we like to call them) are just following their passions and doing their jobs, spreading the word about how they changed their lives and trying to inspire others to do the same. Don’t resent the fact that most I-gurus don’t seem to understand that January, for you, is more about recovering from last year and getting ready to be swamped with late BASs in February.

Instead, change your calendar to suit YOU. Make March the beginning of your New Year. Harness the energy of those I-gurus, cherry pick the sense out of the Tsunamis of palaver, and use it to become your own best boss. Allow 2013 to be the year that works for you.

Five simple tips – Do they work for you?

• Do what works for you. Be smart and work in a job or career that works for you. That may be a 60-hour-a-week high pressure job, it could be a 25-hour-a-week bookkeeping gig that pays the bills and gives you ample time off to join the circus... Forget about what you’ve been told you SHOULD be doing. Listen to yourself and do what works for you - for your family, your relationships, your community, your world.
• Work hard at what you do. When you discover what works for you, whether the work takes 60 hours or 4 hours of your time each week, work darn hard at performing the work well. Be the best worker you know how to be – then knock-off, go home, enjoy the rest of your life. If you don’t have a life, there is no time like NOW to create the one you want.
• Be consistent. If you start a new job, don’t expect to be an expert in 5 days. Work at it consistently and pretty soon you will be quietly amazed at how much you know.
• Take time off (and be consistent about it!). Grow the life you want to live. Go on, start NOW! Grow a garden, go to the gym, get a hair cut, meditate, sky dive, travel, stay home and read a good book, pat the dog, stroke the cat, call your mum, teach the kids how to make their own beds, bake a cake, tell them stories about life before iPhones – any mobile phones, even… Do whatever floats your boat, not what sinks it along with your spirits.
• Take time to learn something new. Learn a new app, learn meditation, learn Advance Australia Fair – all six verses. Learn more about what works for you.

Allow 2013 to be the year you enjoy being you, rather than trying to be someone else’s version of you.

You will be more productive, more effective and happier across all areas of your life. Go on, I dare you – be the boss of your dreams. Ignore me and do it YOUR way!

Article contributed by Fiona Mac Lean & Coralie Kemp, Remote Bookkeepers

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Handling Complaints

Photo of Martin Grunstein courtesy of Google Images

I'm not in the mood for your anger!

I have been in the speaking business since 1985 and have heard some atrocious stories of poor customer service over the years, but I had an experience on my recent family holiday that is up there with the best of them.

My wife, two children and I spent a week at a five star Australian hotel that was part of a respected chain of hotels. As a hopelessly addicted golfer, one of the value adds of this hotel was a shuttle transfer to and from a nearby golf course. I arranged a couple of games before I went. On the Thursday I was dropped at the golf course and told to ring from a certain phone to go straight through to the porters and they’d come and pick me up. I had a lovely game of golf and was in a good mood but looking forward to getting back to the hotel for a swim and to see my family. I rang from the special phone and after a couple of minutes of hearing it ring I looked at my watch to see how long it would take to get through. It took five and a half minutes (that’s a lot of rings) and the polite lady said she would send a shuttle to pick me up straight away.

I had a drink, read a bit while waiting but, after 28 minutes, there was no shuttle so I rang back. I was on the line for EIGHT MINUTES with no answer so I hung up the phone and rang the hotel’s external number and, after teleprompting, I was put through to reception. I had been waiting again for over four minutes with no answer when a staff member of the golf club asked me how I was going and could he do anything to help. I explained the situation briefly and this nice young man said he’d just finished his shift and would drive me back to the hotel, which he did. He explained the hotel used to own the golf course but didn’t anymore and he’d seen quite a few angry customers waiting a long time for shuttles back to the hotel. I thanked him profusely for the lift and told of my experience to a person at reception. He asked if I wanted to see a manager and I told him I wasn’t interested in making a complaint, I just wanted to enjoy my holiday but I had arranged to play golf again on Saturday and didn’t want to have the same experience again.

Saturday comes and another enjoyable day on the golf course. I ring for the shuttle back and this time I wait six and a half minutes on the phone before I get through to the porter. He tells me he will send a shuttle straight away and I say to him “before you get off the phone, I need to tell you what happened on Thursday because I really don’t want that to happen again”. I begged him to come soon or please send someone in the next ten minutes. When he arrived, I thanked him for coming to pick me up and told him I wasn’t angry at him, I was angry at the system that made me wait so long without the phone being answered. He then hit me with possibly the worst line I have ever heard in the customer service business, let alone the hospitality industry which is reputed to be the best customer service industry in the world.

He said “I’M NOT IN THE MOOD FOR YOUR ANGER. I have 1000 guests at the hotel to look after, not just you”. I said “I am one of those guests and I think I have been treated really badly”.

He told me he thought I was overreacting and I should “chill out”. I asked him if he’d done the training offered by his hotel and did he learn anything about empathy. He said he’d done lots of work on empathy and I told him I thought he’d failed in that area. He told me I could take it up with his boss if I wasn’t satisfied and I told him I’d like to do that. His boss sat with me and did everything right. She apologised and said that she was embarrassed by the behaviour of the porter and said she would report this experience to the GM and would make sure things were changed.  I gave her my business card and said that I wasn’t after any compensation or free gifts from the hotel, all I wanted to was to hear back from her that she had spoken to the appropriate people and no other guest of the hotel would be treated that way. She promised sincerely she would.
I never heard from her!

I will never spend my money to stay at the hotel again and if my clients ask me my opinion about holding their conference there, I will encourage them to choose another venue. The hotel let me down in three separate ways and each way was worse than the one before. Firstly, all businesses have action standards for answering the phone. Some businesses like to answer within three rings, some within five rings. But five minutes; eight minutes; six minutes; and four minutes, which are all over 100 or 200 rings, is just ridiculous. Remember, this happened four out of four times - it couldn’t be put down to a “one off” aberration. Secondly, “I’M NOT IN THE MOOD FOR YOUR ANGER” may be an appropriate statement for a boxer or a wrestler, but it is NEVER, EVER appropriate in business, especially in the “hospitality” industry where the word “hospitable” means friendly and welcoming to guests.

The porter was so out of line I suggest that he should never have chosen a career in the hospitality industry. Thirdly, the rooms manager, after doing everything right face to face, was the worst of all because she never came back to me after promising sincerely that she would. And that is my last impression of the hotel - it influences my perceptions, the stories I tell other people and was the trigger for me writing this article.

Here’s what the hotel could have done even if they weren’t able to change their phone system.

Ideally, after a senior manager was told about my experience on Thursday by the fellow at reception, he could have called me in my hotel room and apologised and told me it wouldn’t happen again on Saturday and he could have given me his mobile number and said if you can’t get through on the direct line, call me and I’ll make sure a shuttle gets to you straight away. That would have been outstanding and I would have told people about this brilliant manager who really cared and my perception of the hotel would have been a very positive one.

The next best thing would have been a porter with a great attitude. He would have told me he would be there to pick me up straight away, he would have apologised for what I had experienced on Thursday and said if there’s anything you need around the hotel, please ask for me and I’ll do whatever I can to help. He would have told the room manager of my experience and there would have been a bottle of wine delivered to my room with compliments of the GM as a token of the hotel’s embarrassment for the inconvenience I had experienced. I would have walked away telling people of the bottle of wine and the good attitude of the porter rather than the miserable experience I had suffered.

But even if none of these were done, a simple phone call from the room manager telling me of the action she had taken to reprimand the porter and look at the system from a guest’s perspective so that what happened to me won’t happen again would have been appreciated. I wouldn’t have been thrilled but that would have pacified me and stopped me telling negative stories about this hotel. But what I got instead was inconvenienced by a system; insulted by a staff member; and then ignored by management. If you are looking for a recipe for corporate bankruptcy, I think INCONVENIENCED; INSULTED; IGNORED would be about as good as you could get.

What I find amazing in this day and age is how few companies have their staff trained in the skills to deal with complaints. I appreciate it may be hard for a small business to justify investing in training in this area but even this international hotel group is not getting it right and, if they have made the investment in training in this area, it is patently not working. When a customer complains he/she/they wants three things: They want to whinge without being interrupted; they want acknowledgement of their inconvenience; and they want to know what you can do, not what you can’t do. Let me give you a real world example of the difference this can make to profitability.

Quite a few years ago I ran some seminars for a company called PIERLITE who sell professional lighting solutions. Their policy was that if a delivery didn’t arrive on time via road train and the client complained, they would airfreight the delivery the next day. This was a very expensive exercise because the cost of airfreight almost always took away all the profit on the job.

I taught the frontline people the basics of complaints handling. Let the customer whinge without interrupting them. Then apologise for the inconvenience they have been caused (an apology for inconvenience caused is not a legal admission of liability, it is an empathy statement) telling them you understand how that has affected the running of their business.

Then, instead of agreeing to airfreight the job the next day, I got them to ask the customer (after pacifying them) “what can we do to put it right?” It turned out that over 80% of the clients did NOT need the delivery airfreighted the next day, they would say things like “just make sure it doesn’t happen again” or “make sure it’s on the next road train” or “tell the dispatcher he’s an idiot”.

PIERLITE arranged for the delivery to go on the next road train and with the top 20% of clients they included a nice bottle of red and a card from the customer service person saying: “I am terribly sorry you were stuffed around, I hope you’ll accept this bottle of wine with our compliments as our way of saying sorry.”

Two things happened that affected profitability. Firstly, they saved airfreight costs in over 80% of cases of complaints. And secondly they picked up referral business from word of mouth because their competitors, who also made mistakes, did nothing to pacify and acknowledge their customers when they got it wrong and some of them moved all their business to PIERLITE.

The most important impressions in business are first impressions and last impressions. Do you want your customers’ last impressions after a complaint to be the apology and the bottle of wine ……. or INCONVENIENCED, INSULTED, IGNORED?

Article contributed by Martin Grunstein

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Perfection

I was mentoring a bookkeeper this week who had set aside time to work ON her business and realised in the process how much there was to do. She was working on her Vision and Mission, establishing her point of difference, creating a website she's proud of, implementing systems in her business and desperately needed to recruit because she was flat out with client work. She wanted to get everything perfect before she put on a bookkeeper, but the reality is that she will spend her time frustratingly chasing that illusion.

Wikipedia says that "perfection is, broadly, a state of completeness and flawlessness". I don't know about you, but I'm not perfect

As a great bookkeeper you have built your reputation on perfect bookkeeping which you should not compromise. But when you're working ON your business it's a waste to spend weeks or months getting the wording perfect of your Vision statement. Yes it's important but it's likely to change in the next few years because you'll realise it wasn't big enough. Create one that inspires you now.

If you're already full up with client work and you have systems but haven't implemented them fully don't let perfection get in the way of implementation. Instead, have an honest conversation with the new bookkeeper. Tell her that you have these systems but they're not fully implemented so you're going to work on that project together. She will respect your honesty and will see through any illusion you try to create around being perfect.

One of my Core Values is Continual Improvement and although I aim for perfection I achieve a whole lot more now that I'm comfortable with the notion that my best is good enough.

Are your important projects stalling because you're chasing perfection?

Article contributed by Debbie Roberts from Pure Bookkeeping

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Are you treating your bookkeeping clients like your children?

I was mentoring a licensee this week about a client she has who is running their business into the ground. They incurred a large debt to start the business because they had insufficient capital and they haven’t been able to get on top of that. They are not looking at any reports she provides to help them understand what the figures mean and when there is money in the bank they are taking “wages” out that their business can’t afford. She is worried about their financial position and losing sleep over it while the client carries on regardless!

One of the admirable traits of a great bookkeeper is empathy. Wikipedia describes empathy as “the capacity to recognize feelings that are being experienced by another.” Bookkeeping is not just about number crunching, it’s about giving the client peace of mind. However we can go too far by taking on the burden of your client’s business and that’s not your job. You’re not their parent.

When you have children you teach them to take responsibility for their own actions. It can be challenging as parents as we learn to let go and allow them to make their own decisions and sometimes see them suffer the consequences. We do whatever we can to guide them and we’re there to pick up the pieces when things don’t work out.

Be clear about what your role is in your client’s business. You are not their parent! You don’t and can’t take responsibility for them. That doesn’t mean that you don’t care though.

My advice to her was that the client needs a metaphorical “slap in the face” by having a meeting with their accountant to wake them up to the reality of their situation and to start behaving like business owners and taking responsibility for their actions.

Article contributed by Debbie Roberts from Pure Bookkeeping

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