Zero Excuses: 4 Reasons Xero Rocks Your Business World

You and Henry Ford have some common characteristics. Both entrepreneurs. Both growth oriented. Both focused on systems and processes that enable your business to scale and grow.

Ford achieved it with his production line approach to building Model-T Fords.

Your business can achieve it with Xero.

You see, Xero is actually about more than accounting. It is a platform for building efficient business processes. Processes that make it easier to manage, control and grow your business.

Processes that make it easier for you to make business decisions, look after your clients or customers and, frankly, to sleep at night.

We are massive fans of Xero. We use it in our own business and we help our business clients implement Xero and the various Xero Addon software integrations that streamline business processes.

We are such big believers in Xero, we feel that once a business truly understands the power of moving their accounting, CRM and other processes to the cloud, there are no excuses for not implementing Xero.

Feedback from our clients has been further fuelling our enthusiasm for Xero as a fundamental tool that businesses should implement. Clients who we’ve implemented Xero with typically report back that they save 2 to 3 hours a week on administration tasks.

2 to 3 hours every week. Your time. Your staff time. Freed up.

What can you do with an extra 2 to 3 hours a week? (100 to 150 hours a year!)

Have more time to work ON your business. Have more time to BE with your family. Have more TIME OFF, away from your business.

The choice is yours, and will depend on the stage of your business’ development.

Here are just 4 ways (there are more) that Xero helps grow and scale your business

1. Xero helps eliminate low-value time-wasting tasks

XERO saves you a lot of time by automating tasks such as:

importing bank statements
guessing which account your common expenses go
reconciling your money coming in with your outstanding invoices.

They’ve also put a lot of thought into making the system easy to use. The time you save using XERO compared to MYOB and Quickbooks means the software will pay for itself in no time at all.

2. Xero integrates with mind-blowing software apps

XERO has formed strategic partnerships with other software providers (or “add-on partners” as they call them). This means XERO will integrate with your CRM, workflow manager, payment gateway and other solutions.

This means you can have a simpler business to manage, with apps and data updating themselves, across systems. Apart from the time-saving aspects, it also improves quality, reduces errors and speeds up your processes.

We’ve kept up-to-speed with the Xero’s major add-on partners such as WorkflowMax, Vend, Unleashed, GeoOP, ReceiptBank and others. We’re confident we can identify a vertical solution for pretty much any industry.

So we should talk.

3. Xero makes collaboration easy

With Xero’s collaboration feature you can have multiple advisers and employees working from your one, master always-up-to-date Xero file. This means that in our role as accountants and business advisors, we can help our clients in real-time to work through any issues they may have. No need to wait for data to be updated, files to be sent, imported, and so on. Those days are over.

Real-time accounting via Xero also lets us do things like monitor our clients for accountability if they haven’t reached a certain revenue target. This helps us do what lights our fire: Help our clients focus on the future and achieving goals, not just reporting on last quarter, last year.

On the employee side, your team members can use Xero and addon apps to prepare their timesheets online, which then pushes information through to the fully-integrated payroll system. This makes payroll a dream—especially if you’ve ever experienced payroll done by Excel spreadsheets. This is reason enough to use Xero, if you do pay runs.

4. Xero helps you make faster, better business decisions

As an entrepreneur, you need relevant, real-time and accurate data to make decisions. Businesses often shoot from the hip, making decisions without the appropriate data to base them on.

Using Xero you will feel more control of your business than you ever have before. You’ll even be able to see how it’s tracking, in real-time from your phone or tablet device. This gives you transparency on the real performance of your business, which equals peace of mind. To us, this is another feature of Xero that on its own is reason enough to make the switch from MYOB or QuickBooks or any other system.

These are just a handful of the many reasons it makes sense to switch to Xero.

But just as Ford’s Model-T Ford evolved over time, so is Xero evolving and getting better with each new release (which you never need to install, by the way, being cloud-based software).

If you’re serious about scaling up your business and getting better insights and control on its performance, get in touch and let’s make a time to step you through those aspects of Xero that apply most to your business and industry.

We look forward to rocking your world with Xero.

FAST CASH FLOW: Three Easy Ways To Get Paid Faster

Cash can kill a business. Well, a lack of it can.

In recent weeks a number of clients and friends shared with us concerns about their cash flow. While some are putting it down to election concern slowing down business, we prefer to “control the controllables” as the top athletes say.

Focus on what you can control, not what’s happening “out there” in the economy, outside of your control.

When it comes to your cash flow, the more you focus on “the controllables”, the less you will stress when it comes time to pay the bills.

Let’s look at three ways you can help your debtors—the people who owe you money—to pay you faster and more easily. In accounting lingo, this is termed “reducing your debtor days”.

Keep a track of your debtors

A nice and easy one first up. You are not a bank.

You don’t exist to fund your clients’ businesses and lifestyles through interest-free loans.

To avoid becoming an unpaid bank, make sure your accounting system is kept up to date, to the day. Many businesses get a bookkeeper to come in once a fortnight or once a month. That is too much grace to give to clients if they haven’t paid.

Late payers need to be followed up promptly. They’ll respect that, and they’ll pay you sooner.

We recommend Xero accounting software for easy and almost automated accounting for debtors.

Create systems to efficiently follow up your debtors

We can help you implement systems which will automatically send a follow up email to any debtors who fall overdue. Nice. Chasing up debtors while you sleep. Once set up, this requires very little maintenance.

Give multiple payment options

Nice and simple.

Giving your clients or customers multiple payment options means that your debtors have less of an excuse for late payment.

Options such as Visa and MasterCard should be given, and venturing into realms of American Express or even Fee Funding services add other attractive ways for your clients to pay you. Again once set up, this requires no maintenance at all.

Treat this article as a checklist for implementation. If you have not set up each of these systems, let us know and we’ll help you make it happen.

Hobby or Business – Eight simple questions to ask yourself

With more and more entrepreneurial businesses popping up, we’ve come across a few clients who are wondering when a weekend hobby turns into a tax generating “business”.

Generally, if the activity constitutes a ‘hobby’ or recreation, profit generated is not usually assessable for tax purposes. On the other hand, if you’ve got more a what appears to be a business activity, this will be assessable for tax purposes.

The ATO’s Guidance

We like the ATO’s humour in their answer to ‘Am I in business?’ – “There is no simple answer”…

Like a lawyer putting a bet on each way.

But there are some good guidelines that are provided, as each case needs to be looked at independently. The more “commercial” the activity is, the more likely it will be classed as a business. This is important as the profit that it generates may be treated as assessable income with tax consequences. Not only this, but you may be required to register for GST and an ABN.

8 Questions to Ask Yourself

To work these out, we’ve narrowed down the ATO’s list into what we think sums it up:

Do you have a purpose of profit as well as a prospect of profit?
Is your activity carried on in a similar manner to other businesses in your industry?
Do you have a business plan?
Do you use specialised knowledge or skills?
How much capital have you invested in the activity?
Is the activity a part-time side-line or your main income earning activity?
Do you give quotes and supply invoices?
Do you advertise?

The conclusion? Exercising professional judgement. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck… Then it probably is a duck!

We’re all about the Underdog

The ground ain’t no place for a champion

– Muhammad Ali

We LOVE hearing stories of the unlikely people in life achieving so much with their lives – professionally or personally. The same with businesses – we love seeing independent or family owned chains of restaurants or shops competing with the big players globally – it inspires us to support and contribute to their growth! We love the underdogs who get out there and give it a go!

We’ve put together some motivation for you to get up and get out there – regardless of who’s backing you:

1) Take the fight to them

If you haven’t got what your competitors have in staff or revenue or resources, but are still able to perform to the same or even a higher level – don’t run away from it! Take the Fight to Them!… You can’t wait for new business or opportunities to come to you… It doesn’t matter what competitive edge someone else has or if you think a new prospect will think less of you for not being bigger than you currently are… PLEASE Get out there and take the fight to them!!

2) Embrace the trials

You’ve got to embrace the trials… Embrace the tribulations… We all go through them – but you’ve GOT to talk about them differently! There’s no shame in wanting to quit… When we as entrepreneurs or business owners are still working on a Friday night or getting up at 5am every day, because that’s the only way we’re going to fit everything in it can get disheartening… A week ago, we’d had a big week and I’d been feeling less motivated because we were having difficulty gaining traction… We’d been to a great event by our Global Giving Partner Buy1GIVE1 on the Thursday, and after asking a client we brought along his thoughts on the day, I got a response that spoke right to “Our Why“… Having this effect on clients makes the trials worth it!!

3) Believe against all odds

If you are an underdog… You’ve got to BELIEVE against all odds… Close your eyes to everyone… Learn to block out the distractions and get focused… This is first quarter 2014FY and here’s the big idea: CAST A VISION; have a CENTRAL FOCUS… Make sure you don’t get caught up in doing, without setting a goal and then pacing yourself there… Set a goal and find your pace; and BELIEVE it against all odds.

So, what do you have to do to get from where you are now, to where you want to be?

What skills do you need?
What information do you need?
What changes do you need to make?

If you can believe it; if you can conceive it – you can ACHIEVE it!

Do you see an apple seed, or an apple tree?

“What you are [going] to be, you are now becoming”

After our first few months out and about, we’ve seen some HUGE potential to lead our clients and future clients to the next level! The current “economic climate” has presented its challenges to quite a lot of businesses, but our question is – what can YOU do to change that? How do you CREATE the environment in which you can bring YOUR dream into REALITY?

At Inspire CA, we have recently implemented Verne Harnish’s ‘Quarterly Themes’. In summary, these themes are used to get the whole firm on the same page and focused on our quarterly targets. To kick off the first 90 days, our theme is ‘Seed or Tree’. As we have launched Inspire CA in the early part of 2013, we thought it prudent to adjust the focus from us as a ‘start up’ or ‘seed’ to our vision ‘Not just adding value, we’re multiplying it’ or our ‘tree’. This is where we want to be an integral part of our clients’ businesses, that we’re not only going to have an effect on them, but they will in turn have an effect on their clients, staff and friends. We want to be an accounting firm so inspirational, you won’t recognise us as the ‘accountant’ stigma. We want the best for our clients, our friends and our family and pushing them towards greatness is part of the process.

Three thoughts:

1) You’ve got to have VISION

Everybody has ‘SIGHT’ very few people have ‘VISION’. You are the captain of your own ship, the choice of destination is 100% yours. You don’t need a co-signer on your dreams! Our recommendation is to set these goals high, to set them so ridiculously outstanding that they seem unachievable. We find that most people only push themselves as far as they can currently see… Impossible is Nothing, so we say go for it!

Our challenge: Write down an AWESOME vision for your life, business or career.

2) Create the right ENVIRONMENT

One of our beliefs is that you are the average of the closest five people around you. This can be a positive influence or a negative influence… There’s going to be plenty of people who think you can’t, or you’re unprepared, or you need a certain certificate or need this or that – forget them!! Find people that are going to SUPPORT your dream; find people that INSPIRE you; find people that ENCOURAGE you and follow these people!! If they’re out there getting it, join in and go get it!

Our challenge: Invest in those who think you CAN and forget those who think you can’t…

3) Believe in YOU

The first step, the first move forward is believing that you CAN. You are POWERFUL BEYOND MEASURE and at Inspire CA, we really want our clients, our staff and our friends to take ownership of the FACT that they are powerful beyond measure. Sometimes we can get focused on what has gone wrong in the past or we can focus on our weakness or what holds us back and this discourages us. Failing does not make you a failure!! We challenge you to focus on what has gone RIGHT and focus on what you have been called to do. We know that everyone has a skill set, a gift or a talent that is on a level that ordinary people do not possess. We want to urge you to use this gift to take your life or your business to the next level! If you need any encouragement on this point, please check out Eric Thomas’ video ‘Powerful Beyond Measure’.

Our challenge: Don’t settle for average – believe in yourself regardless of your circumstances. BE PHENOMENAL!

So what do you see in your life or your business or your career? Do you see the seed, or do you see the tree?

Why use a Chartered Accountant?

We are frequently asked what the difference is between an ‘Accountant’ and ‘Chartered Accountant’.

This article aims to give you an insight to the differences between an ‘Accountant’ and a ‘Chartered Accountant’, along with why we have chosen to align ourselves with the Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia (“ICAA”).

Differences between an accountant and a Chartered Accountant:

In summary:

A Chartered Accountant or “CA” is a member of the ICAA
A CA has completed a university degree, along with the CA Program to earn this membership
The CA Program consists of three years mentored practical experience, together with a rigorous study component
The use of ‘Chartered Accountant’ in Australia is restricted to members of the ICAA
We have chosen to be aligned with the ICAA for the highest level of accountability, excellence and confidence in the industry
See the ICAA’s article on the same question here

Institute of Chartered Accountants

The Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia is the professional body for Chartered Accountants in Australia and those members working abroad.

The ICAA represents more than 72,000 current and future professionals and business leaders and is a big player in upholding the financial integrity of our society.

Members strive to uphold the accounting profession’s commitment to ethics and quality in everything they do, alongside an unwavering dedication to act in the public interest.

To become a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia, accounting professionals are required complete the ‘Chartered Accountants Program’. This program includes both a study component (Graduate Diploma of Chartered Accounting) and a minimum three years of practical experience, mentored by a Chartered Accountant – in addition to their university studies.

The Chartered Accountants Program, currently preferred by the “Big Four” accounting firms, is a rigorous pathway designed to test the accounting graduate. The program provides candidates with industry leading training and knowledge, designed to set them ahead of the pack.

As a firm belonging to the Institute of Chartered Accountants, we are subject to these various membership, training and professional obligations. We have chosen to align ourselves with the ICAA as it is our opinion that it provides us with the highest level of accountability, excellence and confidence in the industry.

“The more people you inspire, the more people will inspire you”

We were recently heard a speaker refer to Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle”. This is a concept where the great leaders of our time command loyalty by communicating in the complete opposite way of anyone else.

In this short YouTube video, Simon uses Apple as an example firstly by communication from the What -> How -> Why, and then reverses it to communicate Apple’s existence from the “Why” outwards.

Although a simple idea, you can see that it has a great ability to enhance communication and interaction with each other and with organisations or brands in our culture.

Can you adopt this technique to enhance communication with your clients, staff and friends?