Accounting Solutions for Business Owners & Managers

You can approach tax in one of two ways:

1. You can reactively treat it as something that needs to be done after the end of each year; or
2. You can proactively manage the situation for future success.

We are in it to help you find tax success in the now and future.

For instance, upfront when you’re starting or buying a business we’ll work through your goals and situation to structure the business for tax minimisation.

Then we’ll work with you as things naturally pop up from time to time, where you need help knowing what your tax obligations are and how best to manage them.

Both to mitigate the hassle of compliance and to reduce tax as much as possible.

As each financial year draws to a close, we’ll work with you so you understand the upcoming tax bills and, where possible, what actions you can take to reduce them further.

Then, finally, after the tax year we’ll get all your tax returns in order and lodged.

So, you’ll find that working with us, you have a trusted confidant who’ll advise you on best practice accounting. Whenever a complex situation arises, you’ll be expertly guided to the optimal result…. and very importantly, it is a highly held value of ours to keep things understandable with clear solutions so you can make the best decisions.

As you’ll see from our many 5-star Google Reviews, you’ll be in great hands. In fact, you’ll be helped by one of the Top 2% ranked Australian Accounting Firms.

We are looking forward to speaking with you soon.

Truly unlocking business growth, to propel your business forward for the long-term, means getting down to the root cause of problems, and fixing them for good.

When you resolve root causes, a multiplier effect happens. You fix more than one problem.

And when you build the internal capabilities to fix root causes indefinitely, well, that’s when you tap into a competitive advantage.

So, the outcome we strive to achieve with you, when overcoming problems like revenue stalls, poorly performing staff or capacity constraints, is not only the resolution of those issues, but also enhancement of your business’ capabilities to dramatically mitigate them resurfacing into the future.

Business leaders who genuinely commit to getting to the root cause of problems and permanently fixing them, are the ones who get to experience sustained success. You’ll be amazed at how few business leaders there are like that; are you one of them?

Go to the Unlock Business Growth page if you’re struggling with achieving viable sales growth, your staff aren’t performing to their best or you’ve got a talent shortage.

If you’re prepared to get to the root cause of problems, then also go and see the Build a Sustainable Competitive Advantage page.

And when you’re ready, go to the How We Get Started page and book a free Get to Know Each Other meeting. At that meeting we can explore potential root causes of your problems, and design a Risk Free Trial of our service offerings, to propel your business forward for the long-term.

If you’ve ever wondered why some millionaires have gone bankrupt but still live a lavish life, it can have a lot to do with how they protected their wealth long before a crisis arose.

You obviously hope that you’ll never have a crisis to deal with. But you can never predict the future with certainty.

For instance, it’s not uncommon for some form of family dispute – such as a divorce – to jeopardize the family business…. and these days you don’t even have to be married. Sometimes these situations can seriously harm wealth that has been hard earned over generations.

When in business, there are known and simpler risks to protect against, such as business name risk. There are also the potentially devastating ones like mishandling ownership of intellectual property. Then there are the unknown risks.

You have the opportunity to use strategies to protect your business and family’s wealth. The key is to proactively make this investment in protection early – since waiting until a crisis is on the horizon is often far too late.

Please, if you’re in business or about to go into business, seek out professional help to limit your exposures.

This is something we take great pride and care in, and would be delighted to help you with.

Do your due diligence.

That’s something you’ve probably been told or read about as you’ve been making your way through the buying a business journey. But what does it mean and what should it achieve?

They’re interesting questions to answer and one’s we have some important insights to share.

Due diligence, with regards to buying a business, generally refers to the process of investigating the claims, facts and overall situation to uncover the truth. Its purpose is to help you decide whether the business is actually worthwhile buying.

What you might not know is that not all types of due diligence uncover the same truths. You can limit the due diligence in many ways. It might only look into:

• Tax and legal;
• The financials for the last couple of years, as opposed to the last five years; or
• It might include a customer analysis, supplier analysis and/or key dependency risk.

Generally, we’re advocates for conducting a comprehensive due diligence.

It just doesn’t make sense to have limited due diligence given the substantial dollars involved and the risks you’re taking to buy the business. That’s a key lesson we’ve seen learnt the hard way by new business owners.

Let us share a couple of brief learning experiences to emphasise our point:

1. At the beginning of a due diligence project, often you’re supplied with a detailed due diligence checklist to get a good understanding of what could be done.

   Sometimes people chose to reduce the scope to a limited financial due diligence.

   A limited financial due diligence will result in a report expressing the opinion of the financial health of the business.

   For instance, it might say that the business has been steadily getting worse over the last few years. In circumstances like that, this might make you go back to the negotiating table and perhaps reduce the purchase price accordingly.

   You would have benefited from the due diligence, but, because it was limited in scope, otherwise identifiable challenges would not have been addressed prior to the acquisition.

   For example, a limited financial due diligence would miss key customer dependency risk. Such as, the situation where a major part of the customer base had ties with the prior owner.

   This could subsequently lead to the loss of many customers shortly after the business changed owners, which naturally would have a major negative impact on revenue and bottom-line profit.

2. In this second learning experience regarding doing your due diligence, a business was acquired and for a few years, things were going pretty well for the new owners. However, unbeknown to them, they were operating against local council laws.

   What happened next was a sad struggle to keep the business afloat. Eventually the owners had to abandon the business, as the local laws make it unviable.

   Prior to buying the business, if a comprehensive due diligence had been completed, it is likely that the law breaking problems would have been uncovered.

   This would have allowed the prospective buyer the opportunity to proactively resolve such issues prior to the purchase, or directed them to buy an alternative/viable business instead.

To summarise, one must always be extremely careful when buying a business. Limiting a due diligence may be appealing in terms of being less costly and quicker, however, the long-term implications may prove very costly.

With experience, we’ve learnt to look for and find more and more otherwise hidden risks.

We are invested in wanting to assist you in buying a business that has the best chance for long-term success.

If you’re keen for this outcome, please reach out to us.

When starting a business, you need to tick off the basics.

Some of your decisions may have profound long term implications. Especially with regards to:

• Tax deductibility,
• Tax minimisation,
• Access to Government grants,
• Capital raising, and
• Liability protection.

Besides the tax and legal considerations, there is the most important factor: Are you pursuing a viable and worthwhile endeavour?

Consider these situations:

1. If you’re seeking to go down the disruptive and high-growth start-up path, you’ll want to be nimble, highly agile and connected to the start-up ecosystem.

   Very importantly, you’ll need to be highly critical of your business idea:

   • Are people really going to pay for your product?
   • Will they pay a high enough price to cover known and hidden costs (don’t under-appreciate the hidden costs)?
   • Is that market going to be big enough, and will you be able to defend your position?

2. Are you just creating a be-your-own boss type of business?

   This is where you might be great at getting and doing the work, but the financial rewards are perhaps just slightly better than a wage or salary job (sometimes it ends up being worse).

   Is that worth the 24/7 business ownership stress and risks?

   What might you be able to do to make it worthwhile?

3. Do you have the skills and passion to work ON-the-business, instead of IN-the-business ?

   A great many aspiring business owners are domain experts.

   They are exceptional at getting the work done to deliver the product to their customers.

   But, owning a business, especially one you hope to be worth millions one day, demands far greater management. You will need to build a team capable of:

   • Creating customer demand,
   • Winning that business,
   • Recruiting, training and retaining a team of exceptional people, and
   • Throughout, maintain ample cash-flow in order that your business survives.

   These things can be learned, but please be sure to give these challenges the respect they deserve.

We encourage you to join the Munro’s Business Academy to help you as you start your business journey , and please feel more that welcome to reach out for additional help when you’re ready.

If you’re ever in doubt about when’s the right time to seek professional help, please follow one of our key pieces of advice, which is to be proactive and ask early.

There comes a time in the business growth journey where you encounter considerable trouble getting your business to perform as desired.

A leading cause is because the way you’ve done business up to now has been designed to work very well for a small business. That is where your leadership, and that of your managers, have the skillset to thrive. However, that same skillset, well at least the way it has been applied in the past, is no longer optimal for the new challenges your business faces as it grows into a larger business.

This is a very difficult situation to overcome. Especially when your business is still making decent profits and keeping most customers. It’s difficult because what you’ve been doing does work, to an extent, but it also doesn’t work. You don’t want to jeopardize what you already have, but you can’t let the present growth challenges continue to persist unresolved.

This is especially the case if revenue growth has stalled, since some research has shown that 54% of companies fail to regain even moderate growth within a decade of a revenue stall, and when slow growth persists for more than 10 years the delay is most often fatal.

What you don’t want to do at this junction is get distracted by one of the almost never-ending fads of business management. You know what we mean, one of those new “high-performance frameworks” offering a silver-bullet to all your problems.

Instead, at this critical junction, we believe on relying upon proven research. Focusing on the key things which professional research has shown to have the highest impact on business growth.

You’ll probably be glad to know that there is research which directs you to focus your efforts on six key areas, so it’s not necessarily overwhelming. You’ll probably also find it good to know these are well-known business areas. What’s the difficult part is usually following through on excelling at each area, since the research indicates you’ll only have a better than 90% chance of “Winner” success when you do all six best practices at the same time.

Needless to say we’d be happy to help you scale your business. It is, after all, the purpose of our business – helping business owners and leaders experience success.

A great place to start is a no strings attached Get To Know Each Other meeting. But between now and then, take the opportunity to sign up to the Munro’s Business Academy where you can begin to arm yourself with evidence-based knowledge capable of propelling your business to greater success.

In that video you just watched, we mentioned some research.

If you’d like the references, simply head on in to the Munro’s Business Academy and you can find them on the Reference page.

In the realm of business, no year is perfect. We strive year after year to get better.

Importantly, what you want to understand and appreciate is that a structured, consistent approach is a great way to embed the continuous improvement cycle.

Monitoring your market-based Total Return to Owners, comparing your performance across years, setting and evaluating results against targets, and benchmarking against industry standards are not just measures; they’re milestones on the path to excellence.

We advocate for a strategic progression through the stages of business improvement. This isn’t merely about cost containment or waste reduction, though these are important. Our focus is on fostering ‘profitable’ growth – the kind that sustains and enhances your business’s value over time.

Dive into our webpages on Benchmarking and Profit Improvement to gain further insights into what you could be benefiting from.

When you are ready, schedule a free meeting and let’s see how we can tailor an approach for maximum benefit to you.

We understand that navigating the world of taxes and accounting can be a daunting task for business owners, financial controllers and internal bookkeepers across Australia.

Our mission is to simplify the monthly, quarterly and annual compliance process, providing the support you need – as much or as little as required – to not only meet but minimise your compliance burdens and liabilities.

We offer comprehensive accounting and bookkeeping assistance covering a wide array of services including payroll, management reporting, budgeting, projections, and both monthly and quarterly activity statements.

We believe in proactive compliance management, which is why we highly recommend engaging in annual tax planning before the end of each year. This not only aids in mitigating taxes but also provides clarity on your upcoming tax obligations and therefore cash flow management.

Once the tax year concludes, our team is dedicated to preparing your financial statements and tax returns efficiently and accurately. And if a Fringe Benefits Tax Return is on your list of obligations, rest assured, we’ve got that covered too.

Life in business is unpredictable, and whenever you encounter surprises or need guidance, we’re just a phone call, an email or a meeting away—online or in person.

Our specialisation spans across almost all areas of accounting and tax, ensuring that we’re well-equipped to assist you no matter the challenge.

So, as a business owner, executive, financial controller or internal bookkeeper, please feel welcome to reach out for exceptional assistance.

At Munro’s, The Professional Problem Solvers, one of our specialties is assisting Australians with accounting and business improvement associated with selling their business.

Whether you’re planning to sell to an unrelated party or through succession to family members or management, we are here to help.

Our role is to ensure you are well-prepared for the sale, aiming to achieve your financial goals while mitigating taxes. It’s crucial to start preparing several years beforehand. Early preparation can significantly influence the outcome of your sale, which we highlight on our Selling a Business webpage.

Determining a realistic business value is essential. Through profit improvement and strategic growth programmes, you can positively impact your business’s value.

Additionally, proactive tax planning a few years before the sale could dramatically reduce your eventual tax burden.

A comprehensive plan should also address what comes next, including tax-effective retirement planning.

For those considering business succession, particularly to family members, we recommend visiting our Successful Succession Planning page. There we cover what incoming owners should consider, what retiring owners need to do, and how large family groups can preserve and grow wealth while protecting against potential family disputes.

Please explore these pages if you need assistance and take note of the wonderful 5 star reviews that clients have submitted in relation to such professional work we have provided to them. It’s thanks to reviews like those that we rank in the Top 2% of Australian accounting firms.

When you’re ready for our help, we’re here ready to assist.

See you soon.