We have restructured a couple of the roles for the team with Bernice taking on more of the admin and being a jack of all trades excluding anything to do with accounting, GST and payroll.  We have employed Anka Browne as our GST & Payroll Administrator.  Anka has experience in bookkeeping for small businesses and she will be dealing with the processing of the GST returns and running the payrolls for clients that we do these roles for.  So no doubt you will be getting lots of emails and phone calls from her when she is processing your GST returns or payrolls.

It is that time of the year again and the Accountancy Insurance Audit Shield is up for renewal.  This is becoming a must have for clients with the increased activity by Inland Revenue.  They are even on the road now visiting business premises and private homes and arriving unannounced!

Audit Shield covers you for any Inland Revenue review or audit activity for all tax types including even if it is just sending them an invoice or further information to confirm a GST or PAYE return that has been filed.  Audit Shield is an inexpensive way to cover yourself from an unexpected accounting bill due to Inland Revenue investigations.

Have you updated your logbook lately?  Maurice is going to own up to be guilty of not.  Early in 2025 he purchased a new business vehicle and thought he would update the logbook.  Turns out he was well over the 3-year time frame and in fact, it had been 5 years since he had last done a logbook!

Remember you have to do a logbook for 3 months and it lasts for 3 years.  The easiest way is to take a note of the starting kilometres then record all the business trips for 3 months and then write down the closing kilometres. The difference will be the private trips and from there we can work out the business percentage to claim.

Like any good business Makes Cents also reviews the way we do business.  So some points to note are that we are moving to direct debit for our monthly package clients.  Most people seem to think they are on direct debit anyway so we have introduced it as a payment method for clients, and we will do away with automatic payments.

From 1 April 2026 interest will be charged on overdue accounts.  It seems some clients think we are a bank.  We are not and have suppliers and commitments to pay just like any other business.  For those of you who pay on time every time this will not affect you and we thank you.