Is your Business prepared?

Preparing a month by month cash flow projection for the next 6 months is a great tool to show how long your business can survive and factoring “what-if” scenarios in your business depending on best case, worst case and likely case can assist with decision making.  There are likely to a number of business decisions required including:

• Employees and their working arrangements including reduced hours, annual leave, sick leave or redundancies
• Assessing hardware and software requirements if employees are working from home
• Deferring Payroll Tax Obligations
• Managing Tax Obligations
• Supply chain availability
• Health of your staff,customers and suppliers and interactions
• Reduced volumes of income

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What do I do if an employee gets sick?

If you’re an employer and one of your employees has come down with the Coronavirus  or has to self-isolate, here is a quick summary of how to pay them:

- Full time and Part-Time Employees – can take paid personal leave. If they don’t have enough accrued leave they can take unpaid personal leave
- Casual Employees – They are entitled to 2 days unpaid carers leave per occasion.

An employee must give their employer evidence of the illness if the employer asks for it.

If an employee wants to stay home as a precaution they will need to make a request to either work from home, take some form of paid or unpaid leave such as annual leave. This is up to the employers discretion.

More information can be found at www.fairwork.gov.au

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Relief Packages for businesses affected by Covid-19

The Australian government is offering administrative relief for certain tax obligations, including deferring tax payments up to four months.

The Qld Government has announced a relief package for businesses affected by the Coronavirus where you can apply to defer lodgement and paying payroll tax returns until 31/7/20.

You may be eligible if:
- You pay less than $6.5M in taxable wages; and
- Your current turnover, profit, bookings, retail sales, supply contracts or other factors – compared with normal operating activities – have been affected directly or indirectly by COVID-19.

You can apply for this now on the OSR website qldtreasury.syd1.qualtrics.com and defer lodgement and payment obligations until 31/7/20.

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What you should do in your business

Minimising the spread of any illness at work is a good practice for your team and your customers. We recommend you communicate with staff and customers on how you are preparing.

Like Infuenza, Covid-19 symptoms include runny nose, sore throat, cough, fever and in severe cases, difficulty in breathing.

Talk to your team about:

• Washing hands thoroughly and drying them well
• Keeping workplace surfaces clean
• Staying at home if they are sick
• Covering coughs and sneezes and limiting contact with people who are unwell.
• For information on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), call the Australian Government's National Coronavirus Helpline on 1800 020 080. Or use the online symptom checker.

If you are able to work remotely, make sure you have the systems in place to make this possible in the event you need to do this.

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Working together

For meetings booked with us over the next month, we are happy to arrange these via online conferencing or calls. Keep in touch and we will work with you to find the best way forward for you and your business.

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If your business is being directly affected currently or can for see this happening in the coming weeks, we urge you to get in contact with us so that we can assist you with managing your cashflow obligations and sanity and book your strategy meeting as soon as possible.

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