Symmetry Services
Small & Medium Business
Service Area
Small & Medium Business
We’re here to free you from the endless accounting tasks. Not only do we let you concentrate on what you do best, but we’ll also provide you with information to make better business decisions, save you money, control overheads, and help you scale for the future.
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Bookkeeping & Payroll
Good bookkeeping is one of the pillars of a successful business. Data entry is important, but it’s also about looking beyond the numbers to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. More than just bookkeepers, our team of fully qualified accountants can help you reduce the costs of routine clerical or accounting tasks. We will also help you improve the efficiency of the year-end compliance process, ensure your accounting and bookkeeping processes are standardised and compliant and provide you with a fast and responsive service.
Included in all our packages is a bound set of financial statements plus a prepared and lodged Income Tax return for the trading entity. We offer full or partially managed bookkeeping services to suit your individual business needs.
Areas Covered
Help you grow your business – A business valuation can show you how well you are performing within your sector, what you are doing right and wrong and help to inform you about making any necessary changes based on the data.
Improve risk assessment – A business valuation can identify areas of potential concern in your business, assess the risks directly and then make changes to mitigate these risks as much as possible.
Increase the value of your business.
Improve business efficiencies.
Lower your risk.
Early implementation of strategies to help you maximise the value of your business upon retirement.
A valuation is the ultimate benchmark to measure your business performance.
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Business Sale/Acquisition
Business valuation is a complex process, and many factors come into play to get a true value of what a business is worth. How to value a business involves comparing several different approaches and selecting the best method based on the analyst’s knowledge and experience. Expert, specialist advice is needed.
Key Benefits
A business valuation is not just for the purposes of buying or selling a business. There are numerous business and legal situations that require or benefit from a detailed valuation including Family Court, Banks, Credibility and Capital Raising. Other benefits of having your business correctly valued include:
Budgets allow you to set targets, or marker posts, against which you can assess actual performance to see if your business strategy is unfolding as planned. If you don’t have a budget or set targets, your business is effectively ‘operating in the dark’.
Most budgets are prepared incorrectly by applying an arbitrary percentage to last year’s results which is nothing more than guesswork. We use a ‘bottom up’ approach and factor in best- and worst-case scenarios.
It’s clear that cash flow is crucial for businesses of all sizes, but especially small businesses. A study found that 82% of businesses fail because they have cash flow issues. Make sure your business is not one of them by leveraging on our expertise in this area.
Many businesses are profitable but they have no cash. It’s important that you know exactly where the money you spend is going and why.
Having a budget is a useful mechanism when seeking finance, as it shows lenders you have the capacity to pay them back.
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Cash Flow and Budget Preparation
Failure to carefully manage cash flow is one of the main reasons why businesses fail. Some business owners would rather bury their heads in the sand so they speak rather than have an accurate picture of the financial health of their business. If the correct strategies are put in place, you can ensure that you always have the correct amount of cash, on time, when you need it to pay suppliers, wages, rent etc. You will also boost your credit rating and make it easier to get finance if you need to expand your business.
Key Benefits
Control – as a business owner, it is understandable that you will want to retain legal and managerial control of your business. After all, you probably put your entire life savings on the line. Some forms of structures are more appropriate for this than others. It’s very easy to lose control of a business if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Choosing the wrong structure will expose you to more costs long-term and will often limit your ability to grow and expand.
Real-Time analysis of what is happening in your business will help you better pinpoint problem areas and take corrective action now to alleviate or mitigate the problem before it gets too late.
Trend identification – Having the correct reports will help you identify trends, both past and present, which can provide important clues to where your business is heading.
Avoid creating a false sense of security – Financial statements can show that the business is stable and profitable however, the business may be falling behind competitors in terms of other key performance indicators (KPI’s). Do you know what your KPI’s are?
Maintain objectivity – Business decisions should be based on more than numbers on financial statements. Other factors also need to be considered.
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Business Structuring and Analysis
Choosing the correct operating structure is important not just from a tax perspective but also in terms of asset protection, succession planning, admitting new investors and control. While it is possible to restructure, doing so is complex and expensive so it is better to get it right from the beginning. We see too many new clients coming to us either having set the business up themselves or had their previous accountant do so, only to find that it was not fit for purpose and exposed them to numerous risks.
Has your previous accountant ever asked you what your short- and long-term goals are, what actions you will take over the next year to achieve them and what support you will need? These are important questions to us just as much as crunching the numbers.
Key Benefits
Clarity provided by reporting on the strategic elements of a business is essential to help business owners make important strategic decisions about the future of an enterprise.
Business owners will usually scrutinise costs, looking for comfort that there is no inefficiency, waste or excess. But an increase in revenue or a decrease in costs many not necessarily result in an increase in profit. Other information is needed.
Financial management provides you with tools to measure and monitor your business performance and will increase efficiency in how you use your resources and assets.
Financial management will also improve your access to finance, reduce your business costs and help you better react to events in the marketplace. Keeping on top of your finances will help you achieve financial freedom.
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Financial Management
If you don’t have a proper financial management system in place, your results and cash flow will be volatile, unpredictable, and often disappointing.
There are two distinct types of business reporting: Compliance & Management. Both are equally important but produced for vastly different purposes and intended for different audiences. Most accounting firms focus on compliance services only but this usually falls short in providing business owners with the range of information needed to survive in today’s competitive environment.
Key Benefits
vCFOs provide compliance, control, and decision support services to businesses, often at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time CFO.
vCFOs provide a layer of dynamic oversight, by reviewing reports and commentary, adding to the reliability of information used by strategic decision makers.
vCFOs establish reporting foundations, systems, strategic plans, budgets, forecasts as well as cash flows to ensure there is adequate funding in place to seize opportunities and grow.
A vCFO is the most cost-effective way to access expertise for businesses that haven’t yet reached the size to afford these essential capabilities in-house or on a full-time basis.
vCFOs are capable of big-picture thinking and a high level of abstraction.
Key services provided by vCFOs include:
Management reporting, Budgeting, Payroll management, Bookkeeping, 3 Way forecasting, Cost analysis, Technology implementation & Valuations, risk management.
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Virtual Chief Financial Officer (vCFO)
A virtual CFO is a commercially experienced accounting professional that takes on the role of CFO for a business on a contract basis. Virtual CFOs fill a void in SME’s commercial financial management capability by providing high value, essential strategic financial management and allowing business owners to focus on running their business. They use strategic planning and forecasting around key business drivers and report performance against these drivers.
Key Benefits
SME owners need to implement best practice financial management as their businesses grow and become more complex, but often they don’t know where to start. Free from hidden employee costs (such as entitlements, payroll on-costs, staff turnover and idleness), vCFOs are very efficient and more affordable than you probably imagine. Whilst spanning the past, present and future time horizons, vCFOs actively manage your business, help plan for the future, improve internal processes and implement internal controls.
Lower tax rate – With the right planning, you can reduce your effective tax rate using lesser-known or currently available strategies.
Flexibility in tax payment – Proper planning provides a more flexible approach to paying your taxes, allowing you to reduce the impact on your cash-flow.
Reduce taxable income – This involves finding ways to more broadly distribute income and reduce how much tax is paid.
Peace of Mind – Eliminate unnecessary stress and uncertainty by knowing what your business’s tax liability will be at the end of the year and make business decisions from a firm, stable and factual base.
Save tax by making use of every available tax incentive and deduction.
See the big picture – working through a tax plan can help you decide whether the structure of the business needs to change, understand where money is not being spent efficiently and make the necessary changes to fine-tune your business.
Increase Productivity – tax savings from tax planning can be re-directed towards income generating plans.
Protect your assets.
Create opportunities for expansion.
Better manage cash flow.
Ensure ongoing tax compliance.
Promote cost-efficient accounting practices.
Correctly structure your finances to facilitate growth.
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Tax Planning
Tax planning involves taking a holistic look at your current circumstances and implementing legally effective strategies to minimise your tax, optimise opportunities to retain the highest proportion of your hard-earned income and to maximise all available rebates and concessions.
Tax planning and tax compliance are not the same. Most accounting firms provide tax compliance services where they attempt to ensure that you meet your ATO compliance obligations by claiming all valid deductions. Compliance is a reactive service. Tax planning on the other hand is a proactive service where is takes a panoramic view of your individual circumstances and designs strategies to make structured tax savings.