The Year for Business Advisory Services!

I'm Peter Towers, Managing Director of ESS Small Business. Welcome to Survival Hints for Small Business.

According to the “Accounting Market Pulse”, a publication produced by the Commonwealth Bank targeted at accountants, this is the year of “business advisory services”.

What are you going to do to be able to make sure that you receive more commercial services from your accountants/advisors during this financial year - the year that the accountancy profession has acknowledged as being the year of business advisory services?

ESS Small Business supplies resources to accountants/advisors to assist them to be able to deliver a wider range of commercial services, other than taxation, to you, the small/medium businesses. These services include:

• articles
• forms
• templates
• videos
• powerpoint slides
• webinars
• news releases

to assist your accountant/advisor to be able to offer these services, without them having to spend an enormous amount of time in preparing that material.

The overall objective is to try to shorten the time that it takes for accountants/advisors to be able to deliver an effective business advisory services range of products to you to assist you to add value to your business. Isn't that what it's all about?

In fact, the product range that we have, covers some vital areas of small business management, including:

Early Stage Innovation Company

If you're interested in trying to raise some capital from external investors for a product, process, service that you've developed… this is the company for you, so talk to your accountant in relation to this. They can use the checklist software that we've introduced to be able to tell you whether you can self-assess as being an Early Stage Innovation Company. You can then raise capital from investors.

Debtor's Management

What is your current debtors' days outstanding? Do you know what it is? In most businesses it's far too high. Your accountant can help you in this very important cashflow management process to reduce the amount of money that you're owed by your debtors.

Personal Property Securities Register

What do you know about the Personal Property Securities Register (PPSR)?

Many small businesses don't know much about it at all, yet this legislation, if you do not comply with it, can financially wreck your business, so one of the most important risk management areas that you have is to make sure you're familiar with how the Personal Property Securities Register works. Talk to your accountant/advisor and your lawyer about this legislation.

Business Plans

Business plans are like maps for tourists; you need to plan where you're going to go and then be able to measure how you're going on that journey. Running a business is no different.

Succession Planning

Succession planning covers the owners of the business, the management team of a business, but it also encompasses all of the team members because unless people are continually training and improving their skills and knowledge, which is really what succession planning is all about, you'll not be able to promote them - you'll have to continually bring in new people from outside.

Virtual Chief Financial Officer Service

The virtual CFO product offering that some accountants/advisors are now able to deliver around Australia is a vital component to assisting you and your management team to have a better understanding of the financial accounts, the key performance indicators, the ratio analysis, the budgets and cashflow forecasts. How it all merges together and then, with that knowledge, your management team should be able to run your businesses far more effectively because they will clearly understand what the financial data is telling them.

Government Grants

What value of government grants did you receive in 2015/16? What about the year before? Do you realise there are billions of dollars being paid out in Australia for virtually every type of business as government grants.

Why do governments offer government grants?

They don't do it just to spend taxpayers' money, even though some cynics might say that. At times, government do it because they're trying to make a contribution and the only way that governments can perceive to do that is to try to improve the overall business performance in Australia by paying about 50% of the cost for some improvement activities to be introduced.

If you're not receiving a government grant, knock on the door of your accountant/advisor and ask them why they're not talking to you about government grants, because I and a large number of other accountants/advisors believe that this is an important process that accountants/advisors should be doing.

To celebrate everything that we're doing as we enter this year of business advisory services, we are presenting a webinar to you, a small/medium enterprise operator, on Wednesday 27th July 2016 at 4pm AEST. We look forward to you participating in this free webinar. Click here to register to attend.

We have produced a special article on the services that accountants/advisors can provide to you, a complimentary copy of this article can be downloaded below.