Create a Custom Business Plan

For those thinking about starting a new business or wanting to improve your existing business plan, the business plan tool from business.gov.au is an easy way to evaluate your business idea and set goals for the year ahead. It asks a series of questions about your business and generates a custom plan for you.

Objective: A business plan aims to establish a framework and guide for setting up the management tools and requirements to run a successful business and helps you adapt as the business grows.

Evaluating a New Business Idea: Whether you’re in the early stages of conceptualising a business or exploring a new venture, the template guides you through assessing the feasibility of your ideas. It prompts you to conduct market research, analyse competitors, and define a strategic approach to ensure your business idea is viable.

Setting Goals for the Year Ahead: For those already in business, the template assists in charting a course for the future. By setting specific and measurable goals, you can outline achievable milestones for the upcoming year. This proactive approach ensures a clear direction and helps measure progress over time.

Keeping Your Business on Track: The template acts as a roadmap for your business journey. It helps establish key performance indicators, enabling you to regularly monitor your business’s performance. Providing a structured framework keeps you on track, aiding in decision-making and adapting strategies as needed to navigate challenges effectively.

Seek Advice from a Professional

Before finalising your business plans, it’s crucial to consult with professionals such as Bookkeepers, Accountants, or experienced business mentors. These experts possess the knowledge and insights to guide you in starting a business and can identify potential gaps in your strategy. Seeking their input ensures a thorough examination of your financial projections, helps validate your ideas, and provides valuable feedback to strengthen your overall business approach.

Guides To Help Your Business

Use these guides from business.gov.au to help you plan, start and run your business. You’ll find resources, tools and where to go for more help.

• Guide to starting a business: This guide will take you through each step of starting a business.
• New businesses: Consider what’s involved in running a business before you start.

An employee’s fund must receive their superannuation (super) payments on or before the quarterly super due dates, including the compulsory Employer Superannuation known as the Superannuation Guarantee (SG)

Super must be paid to all eligible employees. To avoid the super guarantee charge (SGC), payments must be received by the employee’s fund on or before the quarterly super due dates.

Payments can be made at least 4 times a year. This applies from the day employees start working for you. Payment due dates occur quarterly.

Quarterly Superannuation Due Dates

When a super due date falls on a weekend or public holiday, the fund must receive your contribution on or before the next business day.

You can also make payments more frequently than quarterly, for example, fortnightly or monthly. If you do, ensure you pay your total super guarantee (SG) contribution for the quarter by the due date.

If you have missed the quarterly payment due date or made late super payments, you will need to lodge an SGC statement and pay the SGC to the ATO. The missed or late super payments are no longer tax deductible.

Clearing Houses

A clearing house distributes super contributions to your employees’ funds on your behalf.

SG payments made to a commercial clearing house before the SG due date may not reach the super fund until after the due date. Your employee’s super contribution is only considered ‘paid’ on the date the super fund receives it, not the date it’s received by the clearing house.

Note: It’s important that you leave enough time for your SG payments to reach the super fund and allow for their processing timeframes.

However, if you use the ATO’s Small Business Superannuation Clearing House, payments may be considered ‘paid’ on the date they’re received.

Check the processing timeframes your clearing house requires to ensure your payments will be processed before the payment due dates.

Source: ATO – Super payment due dates