Every business has a finance function. The only question is who's running it.
For most NZ small businesses there are three options: do it yourself, hire someone in-house, or outsource it to a team. Each can be the right answer. Each also has costs that aren't obvious until you're a year into it.
Her...
Most business owners don't decide to outsource their finance function. They drift towards it.
It starts with a Sunday night spent catching up on receipts. Then a GST return filed a day late. Then a quiet realisation that you have no idea whether last month actually made money. None of these on thei...
If your business provides a vehicle to a staff member, or to you as a shareholder-employee, the way FBT is worked out on it is set to change.
A tax bill introduced on 10 September 2026 proposes replacing the current approach to FBT on motor vehicles. It is not law yet. It still has to get through P...
Last week we put a price on doing your own books. The part people pushed back on was the mistakes.
Fair enough. A miscoded transaction is a five minute fix, and anyone can see that.
It is a five minute fix in the month it happens. That is the whole problem, because almost nobody finds it in the mo...
It usually starts as a sensible decision. Cash is tight, the business is small, and the books look manageable enough. So you set up Xero, watch a few videos, and take it on yourself.
Nobody sends you an invoice for that choice. That is exactly why it is so easy to keep making it, long after the bus...
You have done the maths. Your costs have moved, your margin has thinned, and you know the price needs to go up. And then you picture telling your customers, and you quietly park it for another six months.
That gap between knowing and saying is where a lot of margin goes to die. So let us talk about...
There is one number in your accounts that quietly tells you whether the work you are doing is actually worth it. Not your revenue, and not your bank balance. Your gross margin.
The good news is that it is already sitting in Xero, and you can find it in about two clicks. The better news is that once...
When a business wants to make more money, the instinct is almost always the same: sell more. Chase more leads, run a promotion, take on more jobs. Growing the top line feels like the obvious lever.
But there is a quieter lever that most owners rarely touch, and it does far more for your profit with...
Most business owners can tell you, to the dollar, what they charged for their first job. Far fewer can tell you when they last changed it.
That is not carelessness. Pricing is one of those decisions that feels settled once it is made. You worked it out, it seemed fair, customers said yes, and you g...
If you've ever paid provisional tax, you used one of three methods to work out the amount. The catch is that most business owners never actually chose theirs. They were put on the standard method by default when they first crossed into the provisional tax net, and they've stayed there ever since, wh...
There is a particular kind of stress that only business owners really know. The tax bill lands, the amount is bigger than you hoped, and the money to pay it is not sitting there. You knew it was coming. You just did not put anything aside for it.
It happens to good operators all the time. Not becau...
Provisional tax has a reputation, and not a good one. For a lot of New Zealand business owners it is the tax that arrives bigger than expected, at a time when the cash is not there to meet it. It catches out more owners than any other part of the tax system.
Here is the reassuring part: provisional...