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 ...
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...