Beany is an online accountant. All this means is that we do all the normal stuff an accountant does, but we use technology to make it cheaper, faster and better for you.
What does a small business accountant do?
Our job is to go into your accounting file and make sure that the numbers are right. And, to be honest, no one’s file is ever 100% right. To give you an idea of how not right they usually are, on average the adjustments we put through save our clients $4,000 each year on the tax to pay.
What are the mistakes that we fix?
Sometimes people put expenses through their business which the ATO don’t allow, such as gym memberships, life insurance or grocery expenses for their family. You’d be surprised by what we find in files.
We can also bring in *assets that you’re using and claim *depreciation. We can also save you a bunch of tax by looking at how your business is structured. You could be trading as a sole trader, but if you change to a company, there could be significant tax savings.
Then what happens?
Once we’ve made all these accounting adjustments, then we prepare *financial statements. If you don’t have a company, they still provide a useful record of how your business is doing, and your bank will want to see them if you need a loan.
They show all the business income you’ve earned and all the business expenses you’ve paid, showing the difference as your net profit or loss for a year (usually). They also give a snapshot on one day, the last day of the year, of everything you own and everything you owe, and the difference is how much you’re worth on that one day.
There’s a whole bunch of notes before the profit and loss (also called the statement of financial performance) and the balance sheet (also called the statement of position) and a whole bunch of notes afterwards. These are meant to make it easier to read the financial statements and explain them. Pretty sure no one reads them, but they are required in law!
After those reports?
We look at your total financial situation - are you married, do you have children, have you made donations, do you have other businesses or assets, do you have a rental property, do you pay child support or have a student loan, or dividends or a house in Byron Bay? We look at the whole enchilada and this is where the clever Beany accountants come in - they look at everything and work out using our software, what is the very best tax position we can find for our lovely clients.
Sometimes we will need more information from you - what are your plans for the next few years? Do you have tax losses to use up? Are you getting married (you’d be surprised how important this information can be)?
Once we have all this knowledge about you and your situation, we can prepare tax returns and explain to you why we’ve done what we’ve done to minimise tax.
Then we lodge your tax returns - but it doesn’t end there. We keep an eye on your tax account, we look at the provisional tax (Pay As You Go Instalments) you need to pay and let you know when you need to pay and maybe if you need to pay more, or less, than the standard amount.
How about day-to-day if I need help?
Then there’s other stuff that we routinely get asked about. Should I buy this truck? Can I claim expenses on my boat if I take clients out on it? My Xero file doesn’t reconcile - help! We get lots of questions about any kind of accounting and tax issues and we answer them all via our support desk - we’re there when you need us.
We also do business valuations, specialist tax advice (what happens if I’m buying from China, selling into Europe and I’m a tax resident in Australia), lots of support around cash flow forecasting and cash management.
We'll also help with setting up your Xero file, unscrambling your Xero file or converting your shoebox into a Xero file. We love training you on how to get the most out of Xero.
Finally we also run some software in the background which gives you a daily snapshot of your business with suggestions on how to improve it. You can benchmark to your competitors and map progress to your goals. This is our product called Wealth IQ, which you can access from your my.beany page.
To find out more about what we do, or ask us a specific question, contact us at support@beany.au.
*starred terms definitions can be found here: https://beany.com/accounting-terms/