Walker Hill Group

Date Night With Your Accountant

We reached out to the social networks to ask you what you would ask your accountant if you were to take them on a date.

We collected your questions, then took Nick Hill, partner and accountant at Walker Hill Chartered Accountants, out for a date night where we quizzed him on your tax questions and ATO concerns.

These are questions asked by you and answered for you!

Nick, let’s chat about legitimate tax expenses for small business? Items like how to keep an easy car log, dry cleaning, etc.

Well, you can get a number of cool apps and software that can help maintain a car log, so that’s a fairly easy one.

For dry cleaning though, the ATO does allow a notional deduction for dry cleaning, but it has to be a justifiable expense. It is capped at $150, so it usually turns out to be around 50 cents per wash. Multiply the 50 cents out by your number of washes, multiplied out by 152 weeks.

Can you offer some clarity around lunches. Does it include their share and what about alcohol?

This is always a challenging area. Alcohol should always be kept separately. This can be achieved if you focus on maintaining a spreadsheet where you put all of your lunch expenditure in, splitting out the alcohol portion. The spreadsheet is the easiest way to maintain your lunch expenses even though it does require a bit of work and time.

Have you watched the movie The Accountant?

Yes. It was a great movie, but very little about accounting. Especially in terms of what I do day-to- day. What he did in the movie was forensic accounting and investigative accounting to find an error within management reports. I’m a tax accountant, so we live on the other side of the fence.

How can I minimise my tax?

Each circumstance is different, but obviously identifying deductions that you incur from work is the starting point. Deductions do mean you have to spend money. So don’t spend it unless you need to, because at the end of the day if you spend a dollar, you may only get something like 30 cents back so it’s not worth it to just spend money.

There are some notional deductions that the ATO provides. By this I mean things like your car mileage or time spent working from a home office. Some other private expenses that you may incur are home internet, phone and mobile. However, you need to consider the reasonableness of any deduction you make, because if it doesn’t connect to your work, the ATO will rip it apart every day of the week.

How can I protect my house and private car from being attacked as a result of my business.

With this question, you are looking at more of the asset protection side. The ways that we best assist with this is in structuring. So from a structuring perspective, you can protect your personal assets one of two ways:

1. You can either structure your business into a different entity which then protects your personal assets.

2. Alternatively, you can put your personal assets into an entity to protect it from your business, meaning these items would be under your personal name.

There is also insurances that you can take out, and the legal side of things as well which would require solicitors to be involved. So to achieve protection of your personal assets, you are looking at working from a number of different areas. Our team does a lot of asset protection around slitting businesses and assets by an appropriate legal structure.

How often will you contact me a year?

So with our clientele, we touch base with them as a minimum twice a year, but it really comes down to the activity of our clients as well. There is a handful of clients that I am in front of on a weekly to monthly basis. It is out of necessity for them and helps them grow their business.

Are you charging me for this advice?

Yes! But I’ll use that to pay for dinner.

Is this date going to be a tax deduction?

I doubt it very highly considering it is outside of work hours and there is alcohol.

How can you make me more profits next year? Thanks and pass the dessert.

There is a number of ways that we assist our clients in growing their business. We have very strong strategic relationships with some business consultants that we work closely. They assist with the forward thinking strategies that clients often require. We then assist in implementing budgeting and forecasting in line with the strategies they assist you with.

Our team helps surround yourself with the right people that can help you find the right strategies for growth, as well as assist you in putting actions into place to achieve them.

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