Often clients are devastated when they discover how much tax they have to pay because they didn’t plan for the FYE (financial year end). Leaving it until after 30 June is too late.

We are not tax agents or accounts, but our team of mobile Melbourne bookkeepers can certainly help you get your paperwork upto date so that you can at least have three quarters of the 2009/2010 financial year upto date and ready to visit your accountant before the end of June 2010

contact our Sydenham Bookkeepers, your local mobile bookkeeping service today

There’s only two weeks to lodge your December quarter Business Activity Statement [BAS].

Our team of bookkeepers servicing the suburbs around Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport have received a number of phone calls from small business owners in the City of Moreland council district wanting help to get their MYOB and Quickbooks bookkeeping upto date ready to lodge the December quarter BAS that’s due 2 March 2010

Savvy business owners from Sydenham on the west to Coburg on the East, have contacted our Pascoe Vale Bookkeepers, looking for a mobile bookkeeping service.

Rather than you struggling and getting stressed out over it, give us a call, and we’ll come to your premises and review your MYOB data files.

Our Melbourne mobile bookkeeping service can help you with reconciling your bank account statements. We’ll run various checks and reports to ensure that all the data has been entered correctly and allocated in the correct accounts

The Australian Taxation Office [ATO] advise that almost 80% of BAS forms are lodged incorrectly - as many small business owners are challenged with the task of completing their Business Activity Statements

Contact our Moreland district bookkeeping team today

It’s ripper when it falls on a Tuesday, because it’s a true blue fair dinkum reason to take Monday off, and make it a long weekend!!

Throw another prawn on the barbie, grab a slab of coldies, invite a few mates around, and have a good time

Thanks, girls, whoever you are. And thanks to the photographer, where ever you are – Happy Australia Day

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 March 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 March 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 Melbourne Inner Suburbs, Fitzroy, Richmond, Toorak, Victoria, Australia. Contact us here for details

As bookkeepers we always say pay from the invoice - NEVER pay from the statement.

Why not pay from a statement?
When you always pay from an invoice, then there’ll be no risk of wondering whether you’ve paid that invoice or not - and when your bookkeeper comes to enter the data into the accounting software package, be it MYOB or Quickbooks, the bookeeper will know what you’ve paid and waht you haven’t.

When you receive a statement, it may list invoices that you have since paid, and you could end up paying them twice.

But surely the supplier would tell you that you’ve paid the invoice twice. Maybe, or maybe not.

By sticking to the rule of always paying from an invoice, and never a statement, you can see what the invoice relates to, and you’ll know what the GST component is.

Surely the GST is always 10%?
Not necessarily. Take a food outlet, such as a cafe. The onwer buys unprepared food that is free of GST from a supplier, such as milk - and there’s also packets of biscuits included in the order which are inclusive of GST

What’s the statement for?
The supplier will send out a statement advising you of which invoices have been paid and which are outstanding in that reporting period.

Nothing wrong with attaching the invoices that you are going to pay, and put them with the statement - as long as you ensure that the amount you pay is not the amount requested on the statement, but the total amount of the invoices that are attached to that statement.

When cash flow is tight, you want to do everything you can to ensure that you are not paying invoices twice - and one way of doing that is never to pay from a statement.

She was working for a building company and allegedly wrote out a total of 546 cheques to herself or her family members

Even though the cheques were supposed to have two signatures, the bookkeeper signed them herself.

How many small business owners have any systems in place to ensure that their accounts are not being tampered with by the bookkeeper?

It would be difficult to notice the odd $500 being added to the cost of a building project here and there.

If you are a small business owner in and around Doncaster, Blackburn, Templestowe, Ringwood, Mitcham, and Nunawading, we encourage you to focus on what you do best, and we’ll do the rest

With less than three weeks away before the first quarter Business Activity Statements [BAS] are due for lodgement, there’s not much time to get your bookwork organised

Cash flow has certainly tightened up in the economy. As bookkeepers, we’ve seen that invoice payments are being dragged out longer and longer, as suppliers wait to be paid by customers, and service providers wait to be paid by their clients

For small businesses in and around Doncaster, Blackburn, Templestowe, Ringwood, Mitcham, and Nunawading we have a mobile book keeping service that can come to your office and do the work on-site, or we can take the paperwork away with us and complete your bookkeeping work in our offices

Either way, it’s not a good idea to leave your bookkeeping until the last minute and risk a fine from the ATO for a late lodgement Call us today on 0415 453 536 for more information

The amount was for AUD$210.75. Nothing strange about that, except for the spelling and the grammar.

They ask you to click a link that takes you to a website [ wv.us ] not anything to do with [ ato.gov.au ]

DON’T CLICK ON THE LINK - who knows what may happen - it could result in a little piece of software that invades your computer and extracts your usernames and pass words

It’s probably going to ask you for all your credit card details, so that the fraudsters in question can then go on a spending spree in London!

Not since Kevin Rudd organised for us to have a cheques sent out from the ATO have we had a tax refund.

And, thank you Mr Rudd, because the cheques arrived a couple of days after the ATO sent us a request for us to pay more tax - so much for the “Stimulus Package” - a waste of money, a publicity stunt - and a wonderful inheritance for the yournger generation of this fine nation.

They then try to make a comparison by phoning up other bookkeeping services around Pascoe Vale or Doncaster in the belief that they can hunt around and find a bookkeeper charging a better rate and therefore make the assumption that by paying a lower rate for bookkeeping services they will save money.

On the surface, this may be a logical thought process. Mathematically, it’s a simple equation: The job takes “X” hours @ “defined rate” = Total Cost of bookkeeping services

Therefore by finding the lowest “defined rate” = You’ll lower the total cost of book-keeping.

However, there are a number of variables in this equation. How do you ascertain whether both bookkeepers will do the same amount in the allocated “x” hours?

How do you know that the quality of work will be the same?

There may be a number of reasons why a bookkeeper is charging a lesser rate:
1) The bookkeeper needs the work
2) The book-keeper lacks experience / confidence
3) The bookkeeper does not know the true value of their service
4) The bookkeeper has lower overheads

The bookkeeping rate refers to the amount of money that consumers have to give up to acquire that bookkeeping service.

Whereas the Cost refers to the amount paid to produce that service. The cost represents the sum of the value of the overheads - offices, labour, travel, experiences and expertise.

So when the client asks the hourly rate, do they really want to know how much the bookkeeping will cost? And if they focus on the COST, are they looking at bookkeeping fees being an expense or an investment into their business

A bookkeeping expense could be the result of trying to save money on bookkeeping fees by engaging the cheapest bookkeeper, where as investing in a bookkeeping service that has expertise, experience, and higher fees may produce better results for your business and ultimately save you time and money overall

When enquiring about bookkeeping in Pascoe Vale or Doncaster, remember the difference between hourly rate, cost and price.

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.