How To Get Your Business Ready for After JobKeeper

For some businesses, the end of JobKeeper 1.0 might have been 27 October 2020. But if you are eligible for JobKeeper 2.0 going forward, then your endpoint for JobKeeper is potentially from January 2021 onwards or from April 2021 onwards.

Some things to check, is your business making a profit without the stimulus measures? So cash flow boost and JobKeeper. We’ve got a recording that goes through your Xero file, how to run the reports and separate out your stimulus measures so you can see your profitability without JobKeeper and the cash flow boost. If you’re not making a profit, then you really need to make some business decisions and see if you need to reduce your expenses, how to bring sales in and that sort of thing.

We’ve been seeing a lot of business owners from a personal expense perspective, review what they’re spending their money on. Even right at the start of COVID, that happened with a lot of our clients. You do need to review your expenses and adjust if needed. Make sure to also put aside a cash buffer.

I’ve noticed that quite a lot of our clients have lots of cash in the bank, not necessarily from trading activity or operating profit. It’s actually been from the cash flow boost or the JobKeeper payments. They’ve got huge sums of money, in some cases, hundreds of thousands depending on the business. What I would do is actually keep that aside as a cash buffer. That’s hugely important for trading out of these conditions. So if that’s you, then protect that. Ideally, it’s at a separate bank to your main business trading activities. It’s out of your sight, you’re never tempted to spend the money.