Business advisory to make more possible.

Strategic accounting is about finding out why you are in business and then using your accountant to help you fulfil that mission. Some people feel ashamed to say that they started their small business to make money but don’t worry, it’s really the next step on from that.

You might be in business because you’re really passionate about giving back or perhaps you are simply wanting to fund your dream lifestyle. You want to make money so that you can spend more time with your family and pick your kids up from school, or so that you can go to the beach at 4pm on a Friday and have a beer. Are you achieving that?

As strategic accountants, we can predict how your business is going to look in the near future and the distant future. We can give specific advice to help you reach not only your business goals but your personal ones as well. This is on top of basic services such as tax returns and bookkeeping!

As a business advisory and accounting firm, we figure out how you’re going to get to your special goals. We stand beside you through the good, the bad and the ugly.

The analogy we use is this:

You can go to the gym and do your exercise and diet. But if you go to the gym and you have a personal trainer, there’s someone there who’s monitoring your numbers and keeping you accountable. There’s someone who you show up and work harder for. 

So by having that outside person put a plan together that you can follow, you’re actually more likely to achieve it because you’re not doing it just for yourself. You’re also doing it to show up for somebody else.

We meet with you every month or quarter and go over your budget, your numbers and your financial management to make sure you are on track to reach your specific goals. We offer advice and guidance on your business decisions that are backed by data and numbers. We don’t just hype you up to go big or go home! 

We are also experts in accounting technology and software, such as Xero, and can implement processes to make your small business run smoother and more efficiently.

By doing all this, we educate you for life.

The number one rule is refrain from using your business as an ATM! You can’t just dip in and take money out of your business. Your business and personal finances need to be very separate, so you never have personal expenses coming out of your business bank account. 

Secondly, you should be paying yourself a wage. You also need to be thinking about paying yourself Superannuation for your retirement. Don’t just take what you need when you need it… That’s just asking for trouble at tax time!

We can assist you in understanding exactly what your small business can afford to pay you right now and then decide how much you would like to be paid in the future. If the business can’t afford that dream figure at the moment then we can help you plot the path to make it happen!

Teaching you to read and understand your financial statements is something we are really passionate about!

We sit down with you and a trusty red pen every month and go through all your statements. We explain what every number is, how it is calculated and what it means for you and your business.

Through repetition and question asking, you will be able to confidently understand how your small business performed over the last 3, 6 and 12 months and apply your knowledge to your financial management for the rest of your life. This education will help you make those brave and informed business decisions.

We know that this sounds a bit boring, but in order to be able to read and understand your financial statements, you also need to have really good bookkeeping. 

Your books need to be tidy and reconciled every day, so that when you’re looking at your financial statements, you’re looking at real data and then making decisions based on what happened yesterday… Not what happened last quarter. 

Don’t stress, this is something we can easily help you with.

We pride ourselves on being experts at proactive accounting. Often people say to us that they want someone proactively helping them and not just reporting some numbers that happened two years ago.

Proactive accounting is forward-planning your finances to help you achieve your goals. We want to try and make your life easier by telling you what you’re likely to pay. So rather than giving you a massive surprise just before you have to pay your tax, we’re telling you about it in April, more than a year in advance.

We can create a budget for you every month that features a revenue target and how much you have to bill each month to make a decent profit, to pay yourselves well, to give your team bonuses, to make sure you’ve covered all expenses and to put money away for savings and Superannuation. 

We go through that budget each month or quarter to make sure that you’re on track and you also know what’s coming in the future.

You know that next month you’ve got your BAS to pay and it’s $15,000 that’s coming out of your bank account that won’t be a horrible surprise. It also means that you’ve put that money aside and not blown it. Plus, you’ll find you work harder because you’ve got a target to head towards!

It’s really important to have a budget because you feel in control. Saving for rainy days is also something we learnt was vital during the pandemic. The people who we saw do really well had a three month cash buffer and a solid budget in place. They just felt less stressed because they had a plan. 

That’s the biggest thing we do with our advisory service. We give you very specific business advice to make sure you have the perfect plan in place to reach your special goals and for whatever life throws your way! 

Talking about tax returns and what happened last year is not really that helpful for you. All it does is tick a box and help the tax man!

What we can do is actually tell you the amount of tax you are going to have to set aside for the ATO. We are proactively advising so that you have a plan in place to know when you have to pay things. You’re not stressed and you feel in control. 

Not only do we proactively plan for tax, we help minimise tax as well. All of our clients undergo tax planning and that can potentially save thousands of dollars.

We create a report that contains strategies that you can implement to save tax, such as making sure you contribute to Super, buying expenses before June 30 and appropriately delaying income. 

It’s very different and personalised to each person and business because strategies that work for one, won’t necessarily work for another. We create a detailed and specific plan of everything that you have to do before June 30 to make sure that you get the biggest tax deduction that you can legally get.

There are three ways that you can grow a business:

• You can be really aggressive and take over other businesses (but you need a lot of cash for that!). 
• You can have organic growth by looking at your target market, increasing or diversifying your services and selling more.
• Or you can simply keep putting your prices up.

What option is best for you? How’s it going to look in your desired time frame? Growth is such a buzzword and it means different things to everybody.

We have seen clients with 200 employees and offices all over Sydney and all that growth actually made them really unhappy. They didn’t want to be that big, they didn’t want that many clients. They wanted to grow in terms of the value they could add to their clients and not the numbers. 

We want to understand why you want to grow. Do you want more money? Do you want more time? Do you want more control? Do you want to sell your small business in five years? Do you want to sell in 50 years? Do you want to pass your business onto your kids? 

By understanding your purpose for growth we can then work on a personalised business strategy specifically for that. 

We are business advisory experts and know both sides of the table inside and out. We can help guide you to ensure you get the best outcomes you are looking for. These are just a few to get you started:

• How do you charge?
• How are you going to help me? 
• How are you better than what I’ve got?
• How responsive are you?

Yes, you should be asking about responsiveness! Here at Orbit we have a 24hour response policy for all your methods of communication with us, so you are never left in the dark wondering where we’ve gone!

Getting out of debt is a long term business strategy and it all comes back to the magic word: ‘budget’.

Think about how much money you are going to make this month. How much of that is going towards your debt? How much of that is going towards marketing to bring more people in to feed paying back that debt?

Maybe you need to talk to a business broker to refinance, or look at a short term loan to pay down that debt to get a better interest rate. Perhaps you need to pay off personal credit cards before you pay off company debts because they have higher interest rates. 

A lot of the time we find that people who are in a lot of debt have their head stuck in the sand and they don’t want to think about it… and understandably so! By having someone like us you can talk to and unleash your stress on, you can then move forward. A problem shared, is a problem halved.

We consider every option and create what we call our “Sleep Better at Night” service. We put a budget in place and can hold you accountable to it. 

Now you’re not worried or concerned because you know that you’ve got a plan in place and by a certain date, you are going to be out of debt. What a relief!

Setting goals and planning your future with us is fun! We get you a really long roll of butcher’s paper and we help you write down what your ideal life looks like and plot out how you’re going to get there.

Why did you start your small business? Think about where you are now and where you want to be in a year. Where do you want to be in five years? What does that look like? Then you simply work backwards from your end goal.

Some of our clients want to donate as much they can to charity, so we make sure that every bit of business advice that we give is resulting in the biggest profit possible.

We have other clients who are really happy earning what they earn but they want to take time off to travel. We can work on getting their clients on retainers so that they can earn income without the stress of having to work every day. 

We help you set specific and achievable goals not only for your business, but for your personal life too.