Home » How MP+ Can Help During These Challenging Economic Times

How MP+ Can Help During These Challenging Economic Times

Interest rates are on the rise, the cost of living is increasing, and pressure on households and businesses means that many people are feeling the strain. At McKinley Plowman, our wide range of services, in-house expertise and broad network of professionals allows us to support individuals, families and business owners in navigating these challenging economic times.

Tax & Accounting

Tax Consulting

Have you outgrown your existing business structure? If so, there may be an opportunity to restructure into a business structure that suits your current business operations whilst remaining tax efficient. We have streamlined a process to review your existing structure and provide some options that align with your long term commercial objectives, through to implementation. Find out more about our Structure Reviews here.

Are you about to embark on a major transaction e.g. sale of a significant investments or business venture? If you are planning to sell an asset such as a business, it is best practice to go through a CGT optimisation review prior to the sale.  This allows an evaluation of the tax position, including access to potential exemption, concessions or tax planning strategies. The MP+ tax consulting team can work with you to ensure an optimal tax outcome is achieved. Find out more about Tax Reviews here.

Maximising Deductions

Our 25+ years of experience in helping clients maximise deductions and optimise their tax position means we can do just that for you. Practically speaking, this means you’ll either save tax payable or increase your refund so you have more in your pocket. And given the current economic climate, the more cash in your pocket, the better! Click here to find out how MP+ makes your tax return easy.

FeeSynergy & Fee From Refund

We are proud to offer FeeSynergy and Fee From Refund arrangements. FeeSynergy allows you to pay off your accounting fees over time rather than one large bill, which is a great cash flow advantage for many businesses. Fee From Refund takes the hassle out of paying for your Income Tax Return – where our fee is simply deducted from any refund you receive.

Audit Assistance

If you’re on the verge of an ATO audit, you’ll likely have lots of questions and require assistance to manage the process effectively. Several of our clients have been able to rely on our collective experience to guide them through an audit situation.

Wealth Management

Reviewing, Advising and Supporting your Wealth goals

Our key role is to take financial stress out of your lives and ensure you are getting the best outcome you can with what you have. We do this by reviewing your current position versus your future goals and check if you are on track, including reviewing your investments. Then, we advise on strategies to meet your financial and lifestyle goals, manage your super and investments, provide risk management advice to ensure you and your family are financially secure, provide ongoing advice on regulatory, economic or personal changes, and allow you to focus on work and life.

Filtering Out the Noise

Further comprising our Wealth Management service is our ability to filter out the noise – by only focusing on the issues that are going to affect you and thereby giving you clarity and confidence. We also model and quantify how various changes can or have affected your portfolio, as well as how they will affect your ability to fund your future aspirations. Or expertise allows us to guide your decision-making and avoid making rash ones – looking at if the current challenges are structural or cyclical. If they are cyclical, things will likely bounce back and therefore a drastic decision may not be required.

Business Improvement

Forecasting

Whether it be for business or personal, the cost of everything seems to be on the up. For your business, it is crucial that these expenses a monitored closely to ensure that your business can absorb these costs if they’re temporary, or passed on to your customer if necessary. An effective way to monitor and project forward your revenue and expenses is with a three-way forecast.

Our business improvement team can prepare 12-24 month three-way forecasts to project forward your revenue and expenses to factor in known increases in materials, labour, interest rates and other business overheads to demonstrate the impact they will have on your bottom line and also at what cost to your lifestyle. Along with detailed assumptions and industry benchmarks, we can work with you to make informed financial decisions on the business whether it be reviewing your pricing methodology, cutting costs, or making adjustments to business processes. These forecasts can be updated regularly to factor in any ‘what-if’ scenarios to demonstrate the financial impact of any future business decisions.

Management Reporting

When combined with quarterly management reporting, you can compare your actual results with those projected in the forecast to identify the areas in which the business is performing favourably, and in which it requires attention or improvement. The latter is especially important to capture early, to allow you time to make the necessary adjustments before it becomes a bigger issue. Various business strategies to ride out tough conditions; cost-trimming measures; and re-focusing or re-positioning marketing activity can all arise out of the quarterly management meetings to ensure your business gets through this challenging period.

Looking Beyond the Numbers

Part of our Business Improvement service includes being able to help clients look past the numbers and figures, and identify key areas for improvement within their business. From here, we develop comprehensive, sensible strategies to make tangible changes to the business not only on the balance sheet, but also in terms of processes & procedures, culture, team development, succession, and much more.

Benchmarking

As a business owner, knowing how your business’ costs and revenue stacks up against your competitors can be great information to turn into sustained competitive advantage. Benchmarking data can help you get that information. McKinley Plowman have access to a wide range of financial resources to ascertain key statistics, margins, and ratios for certain industries, allowing you to compare your business against others in your industry. From here, we can identify key areas where you are excelling, others where improvements could be made, and formulate strategies to address any gaps.

Valuations

Our Business Improvement team can also assist with business valuations, which can help you refinance your business loans, sell your business, or restructure.

Tighten Reins on Accounts Receivable

With many businesses struggling and insolvency on the rise, it is critical to ensure that you have a good grip on your accounts receivable. Increased debtor days and bad debts from companies that owe you money can put you in a precarious position yourself, so having a robust collection procedure and clear payment terms is important.

Offshoring

With a hyper-competitive recruitment market and candidates holding the cards at this stage, many businesses, particularly those in professional services, are leveraging offshore teams. Where the roles dedicated to offshore team members were once the entry-level positions, more and more senior roles are being filled by these employees. The cost benefits are one significant upshot, as well as opening up a larger pool of talent from which to select your next hire.

Negotiate Trading Terms

“Everything is negotiable”. Perhaps not everything, but in business it can be worth just asking the question to potentially reap the benefits of a more efficient and cost-effective arrangement. As an example, you could negotiate with your suppliers for volume discounts – buying in bulk to save on the per-unit cost. Leveraging scale in the manner can have a tangible positive impact on your bottom line.

Marketing & Branding

McKinley Plowman’s Brand Plus service assists clients with improving their lead generation, optimising their web presence, managing website build projects, coordinating social media, and developing written content. Repositioning your business’ marketing activities to suit the market and your audience is critical in ensuring that your steady stream of new business opportunities is not significantly impacted by the economic climate. A free initial consultation and complimentary brand health check is the first step to unlocking the potential of your business and its marketing efforts.

Finance

Our in-house finance brokers are no strangers to helping clients get a better deal on their loans, whether that’s for a home, commercial property, or equipment. Given the recent interest rate rises, now is the time to ensure that your loans are still meeting your needs, and to be certain that you are getting the best rate possible.

Loan Reviews, Competitive Tendering and Refinancing

The finance team can review your loans, taking into account your present circumstances and your future goals. Then, through our Competitive Tendering Process, they will put your business in front of lenders and have them sharpen their pencils to give you the best loan facilities they can. Should refinancing be a viable option for you, they will then work on your behalf to put the loan through, saving you time and stress.

Another advantage of partnering with our brokers is that they can investigate the impact of keeping your loans at a fixed interest rate, variable interest rate, or a combination of the two.

Debt Consolidation

The finance team can also assist with Debt Consolidation loans, particularly useful for people who have a variety of outstanding debts (home loan, personal loan, credit cards and even tax debt) and would like to roll that into one easy-to-manage payment. This can reduce your monthly outgoings to ease pressure on the family budget.

Our FREE online financial calculators are also available, and serve as a handy tool for visualising the impact of rising interest rates, refinancing and other services we provide.

Additional Tips & Tricks

There are some things that you can do personally to get through this challenging period.

Diarise Recurring Bills

Recurring bills can be diarised the moment one is paid, and the benefits to this are numerous. Take the example of renewing your home insurance on 1 October for 12 months. You then set a reminder for 1 September the following year, giving you 1 month before the renewal date to gather other quotes, and ensure that you have sufficient funds to pay the premium. This will mean the bills won’t sneak up on you, you’ll have enough money ready to go, and you can spend time shopping around for a better deal.

Plan your Budget

Among the great calculators and tools on the MP+ Resources Page is a Personal Budget Planner. This handy tool can help you visualise your oncome vs. expenditure, show you where gaps or overspending exists, and demonstrates how much you can realistically save each time you’re paid. It takes discipline to stick to a budget, but getting it all down on paper (or a computer in this case) is the first step towards obtaining financial freedom and security.