Introduction
When owners of most small and medium businesses in Brisbane think about accountants, they conjure up images of tax returns, BAS statements, and compliance tasks. While these services are crucial, they represent only a portion of what a qualified accountant can deliver to a business. In today’s environment, accounting firms in Brisbane play an essential role in shaping business success in the areas of growth, profits, and business survivability. Including your accountant in your business strategy will ensure that your business is making financial decisions based on your intentions, properly managing risks, and maximising opportunities. At Milan Accountants, we believe your accountant should be more than a number cruncher, they should also be your strategic partner.
Accountants Have Insight into the Financial Well-being of Your Business
Your accountant sees the financials of your business more than anyone else, they actively report on your cash position, profit margins, expenses, and liabilities. They can see explanatory trends to indicate where you can reduce costs, optimise profit, and/or improve your cash reserves. For Brisbane SMEs where margins are often lean, having this financial view looped through the strategy, can make the difference between growing your business and stagnation. Involving your accountant into your business ensures your decisions are developed from financial reality and not simply guesswork.
Accountants can Help Improve Cash Flow and Funding Decisions
Access to funding is the blessing and curse of every business, yet many business owners struggle to manage cash flow effectively. Accountants can project your future cash inflows and outflows for example by reporting on your prior months cash flow statement to help you strategize for seasonable cash drops or be ready for expansion. If you’re needing to secure funding or are considering taking on external funding, an accountant will provide you with an accurate set of financial reports and projections that strengthen your credentials with banks or investors. Rather than just go into a funding arrangement blind, your accountant endeavours to ensure that you seek the proper finance at the proper time that supports your long run goals.
Strategic tax planning and compliance
Tax is not just a compliance area; it is a strategic area, and with more of your accountant’s thoughts in your planning you can access deductions, small business tax concessions, and structures that keep your liabilities lower. As an example, in determining whether to operate as sole trader, partnership or company, there will be ongoing tax implications that need to be understood now and for the future; your accountant will advise on the most tax-effective structure for your entity to operate and maintain records to comply with the reporting requirements of the Australian Taxation Office. Lower risk, lowering penalties and maintaining the capability of your business strategy.
Driving growth by modelling your finances
When seeking growth strategies, be it entering a new marketplace, taking on staff, or taking technology to market, you will need sound financial modelling. Modelling how each of your core initiatives will affect profitability, cash flows and debt are the areas your accountants can assist your business. For Brisbane SMEs with limited levels of funding it is vital that we try and get as much transparency as you can before entering a decision that can cost you. Your accountants will also help compare your scenarios to help determine priorities for the initiatives with the best capability to return your investment so you can set your business growth goals to a more achievable state.
Managing risk and business continuity
All businesses live with risks including downturns in the economy, change in government regulatory environment, or the market being disrupted. Accountants have been trained to identify and assess financial risks and to build response resilience. They can develop contingency plans for you, they can ensure you have adequate reserves, they can quantify the impending financial impact of all types of risk. If you lose a major client who refuses to pay, your accountant can model the impact to your cash flow and produce suggested steps to mitigate losses for you. Including your accountant as a part of your strategy actively prepares you for uncertainty, rather than be surprised by it.
Using Technology and Automation
Accountants today are more than just bookkeepers with pads of paper. They are technology leaders showing businesses where and how to introduce automating functions into accounting and embrace cloud accounting. An accountant can provide you with real-time financial visibility and significantly lessen manual errors by integrating with tools such as Xero, MYOB, or QuickBooks. These systems allow you to make informed decisions quickly and accurately when they are built into your strategy. At Milan Accountants, we show Brisbane SMEs how cloud accounting systems save them time and support better strategic planning.
Increasing Investor and Stakeholder Confidence
If you are looking to grow through external funding or possibly a partnership or succession plan, bringing your accountant on board will help enhance credibility. Investors and stakeholders prefer a business that provides accurate forecasting, have structured strategy, and can show compliance discipline. Your accountant will help ensure your numbers are transparent and defensible in order to grow stakeholder and investor confidence. This normally is the difference between obtaining an investment or not.
Accountants as Business Advisors Not Always Just Compliance Officers
There is a notable shift in accounting today in that the role of compliance has become advisory. Traditionally accountants are viewed as virtual CFO’s for small businesses to assist in interpreting your financial data, growing your business, succession planning, and all levels and facets of mergers and acquisitions. In any industry in Brisbane, SMEs rely or want to rely on accountants as trusted advisors positioned at the decision table from which SMEs may respond to compliance obligations to operate as a business. The involvement allows the accountant to operate as a vested partner in achieving the long-term vision of the business.
Conclusion
An accountant is so much more than a service provider. By including your accountant as part of your business strategy you gain a partner who understands your financial reality to achieve compliance, risk mitigation, and growth based goal setting and planning. In a competitive environment such as Brisbane’s, small and growing SMEs often forget about this power of their accountant. At Milan Accountants, we are able to obtain compliance factors together with strategic planning, and advising, and offer small to medium sized business financial planning and strategic goals.
If you are keen to take your business strategy to the next level, speak to the team at Milan Accountants today. We look forward to showing you how to access long term sustainable growth, resilience, and ultimate success by including your accountant in significant decisions
