Kevin San, director, Kevin San and Associates
The three months following March and the initial restrictions were extremely challenging for a great many reasons. Perhaps the toughest thing was dealing with clients that really were in a genuine state of distress.
Even the strongest businesses had a terrible April, and that uncertainty translated into a zillion conversations that all came at once. From JobKeeper to Cash Flow Boost, employee issues and supplier management, or even something as simple as helping clients get organised to make the critical monthly revenue declarations on time; most clients had several burning issues that needed to be discussed. Not an easy task when all the legislation is new and had gaps, and you had new processes to be put in place, especially when your own workplace is transitioning to WFH and delegation and training becomes more difficult.
We can all take a bit of comfort that we played a part in helping our clients survive, but staying cool and organised during the avalanche of urgent work was a huge challenge, and we’re all glad it’s over.
Edward Chan, CEO and co-founder, Wize Mentoring
With any accountancy practice the hardest thing to deal with is managing the “traffic” that comes from your clients. Traffic is made up of “communication traffic” and “production traffic”
If you are not coping with the traffic that is generated under normal circumstances, then an event such as a pandemic will push your practice over the edge.
The damage is twofold:
- The first is the inability to have the time to service your client and not being available to them in their time of need.
- The second is working enormous hours and not getting remunerated for it.
The solution is to run your practice like a business and managing the traffic flow needs to be broken into two teams/sections, namely:
- Production team managing all production traffic in relation to completion of work.
- Communication and sales team managing all communication traffic with clients going from “discovery session” (identify need) to a “proposal” (includes a price) in as short a time as possible and then only going to “production” once proposal has been accepted by the client. This avoids spending time on the client and not getting paid for it.
These teams need to be set up where the right people are handling the “production and completing the work” and other people handle the “communication and the sales process”. They are not the same people.
For many firms, the pandemic has simply highlighted weaknesses in the business that needed fixing.
Andrew Azzopardi, AzzCan Financial
All of the stimulus measures have had an impact for our small business clients and have been gratefully appreciated. I can hand on heart say that these measures have tremendously helped the mental health and wellbeing of business owners and employees across Australia during one of the most challenging times we have ever faced.
The financial impact has depended on the industry and the size of the business. JobKeeper, cash flow boost and instant asset write-off have had a widespread impact in the immediate term. Because of JobKeeper, a lot of businesses felt more secure in buying assets before the end of financial year. JobKeeper has certainly been most relevant for sole traders who didn’t qualify for any of the other stimulus packages and has saved a lot of jobs from being lost.
Businesses have also greatly appreciated the additional $10,000 state grants offered by most of the states. They have used this extra money to help stimulate local businesses.
The apprentice subsidies and homebuilder grants will also hopefully have a greater impact throughout the rest of the year and construction clients have noticed a directly correlating pick-up in jobs because of this measure.
