The coronavirus pandemic continues to impact Australian accounting firms at several levels including technology adaptation, staffing issues, customer issues, online training, and scammers adopting to a new scams in a Covid reduced travel world. Working from anywhere has opened up Australian accounting outsourcing to overseas destinations, making this more relevant than ever before! If your firm is using work from …
Australian Accounting Firms: How to effectively Outsource your SMSF work
Need to know the who, what, when, where and why of outsourcing your compliance work. But first, here’s the maths behind the argument that full time SMSF compliance workers don’t work, either locally or foreign hired. Australian accounting firm owners know that tax returns arrive in individual jobs, and at the same time the resources needed to be hired to …
Australian jobs being rationalised by the big corporates: Is this Market efficiency in action?
A lot of airlines can’t be really said to be in the airline business at the moment, and they are certainly rationalising their workforce to get through these troubled times. Recently one of the major Australian airlines made the news as they axed another 2,400 jobs by outsourcing all of its ground handling work at Australian airports. The airline in …
Roadmap for end of compliance: First the BAS, then SMSF, then the remaining tax returns
Bookkeeping BAS’s fully automated A couple of years ago we forecast that bookkeepers and other BAS related compliance areas would be impacted by the automation in bookkeeping, and that in our opinion there would shortly be a BAS button that the SME owner could press to lodge the BAS, thereby removing this valuable revenue stream for bookkeepers/accountants. At the same …
The big upheaval: Australian accounting Compliance moves to the country
Regional housing markets are experiencing growth due to movement from the cities to the regional areas. The impacts of “working from home” arrangements are going to be massive. Not only is commercial and retail space in the CBD’s going to be severely affected, the flow on to supporting services will also be affected. Instead of 20 coffee shops per km …
Rolling the dice with offshore labour. What if they don’t work out after 2 years
We were recently contacted by an Australian accounting firm that had gone down the low cost approach of hiring an offshore employee, then letting her go after 2 years training. At the time she was considering Odyssey versus a number of other providers, the big issue in her mind was to save costs, and hire one person that could do …
Successful recipe for Smaller accounting Firms: picking resource volumes to match needs and demands
In this slightly difficult and turbulent time, it’s the smaller firms that have already utilised part time flexible resource inputs, that have managed to weather the storm slightly better. And with discussions of Zombie companies in Australia, no accounting firm owner really has a clear idea of how many of their clients are functioning viable entities, and how many will …
Why Offshoring Australian compliance is no panacea for Accounting firms with poor systems and processes
Offshoring not always profitable Offshoring work overseas (labour hire of offshore staff) frequently misses the practice efficiencies that Accounting firm owners are looking for. In the absence of having the right systems in places to take advantage of an offshore labour force, the back-office tasks performed offshore don’t necessarily have a positive effect on profitability, despite a lower labour cost. …
Coronavirus Compliance finding: Your staff can work from anywhere, will the Australian exodus commence?
Over the past several months in Australia we’ve seen several things in the Australian compliance area: Australian compliance accountants are equally able to work from home as they are in the office, with little productivity losses. If anything, the time saved in long commutes to and from work has been a blessing. During difficult times, of which we seem to …
The SMSF auditor is tougher this year. Sorry, not sorry
We recently noticed a complaint from one of our accounting firm clients, that the SMSF auditors we were using (we switched to a panel of SMSF auditors) were making things difficult by asking for signed documents from the trustees, pieces of information to prove ownership and valuation, and generally just making the SMSF audit process a lot more difficult, in …
