Picture the second week of January. The phone is quiet, half your customers are still at the beach, and the bank balance is lower than it has been all year. Then GST and provisional tax land on the 15th, and PAYE follows on the 20th.
For a lot of NZ business owners, that week is the most stressful ...
Picture the second week of January. The phone is quiet, the work is only just starting back up, and the bank balance is lower than you'd like. Then the bills arrive: GST and provisional tax on 15 January, PAYE on the 20th, and suppliers wanting their December accounts paid.
The cash that carries yo...
Every year, somewhere around the second week of December, an employer looks at their payroll summary and thinks, "That can't be right."
It usually is. The December payroll is the biggest and most complicated pay run of the year for most NZ businesses. Leave gets paid out in advance, public holidays...
It's October. The sun is finally out, the diary is full, and Christmas still feels a long way off. Which is exactly why now is the time to think about January.
For most New Zealand businesses, December to February is the most predictable cash squeeze of the year. It turns up every summer and still ...
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...
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...
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...
Every business owner knows the feeling. An invoice is well overdue, the customer has gone quiet, and every option in front of you feels awkward.
The good news is that you do not need a difficult personality or a scary lawyer to get paid. You need a process: a calm, staged sequence you follow the sa...
Chasing invoices is the job almost no one enjoys. It is easy to put off, easy to forget, and every day it slips is another day your money sits in someone else's account. The good news is that most of it can be automated, so the follow-up happens whether or not you get to it.
Here is how to set your...