“There is a Market for Accountants to Offer Cashflow Management Advice”
At the Australian Technology Showcase for Accountants (ATSA) Conference in October 2014, the Second Commissioner of the Australian Taxation Office, Geoff Leeper made this statement – “there’s a market for accountants to offer cashflow management advice”.
What did Mr Leeper mean in this comment? After all, he made this comment as part of his overview of the effect of the introduction of Standard Business Reporting (SBR) by the ATO. Mr Leeper indicated at that conference that the ATO had guaranteed the Productivity Commission a “red tape reduction” of, at least, $500 million per annum from the SBR process.
This is a substantial amount of money that Mr Leeper indicated that accountants could replace in their fee mix with cashflow management advice. What’s included?Debtors are a huge problem for a large number of small businesses in Australia. Unfortunately, Australia has the dubious title of having the “longest debtors’ days outstanding in the world”. This “award” was bestowed on Australia following a review of debtors’ days outstanding in over 80 countries by a UK organisation. This international review indicated that Australia’s debtors’ days outstanding was 56.4 days. This means that many small/medium enterprises have debtors’ days outstanding for more than 90 or 100 days.There is a potential opportunity for accounting firms to conduct debtors’ reviews for your small/medium enterprise clients, to see what improvements can be made in the debtors’ days’ outstanding figure.
These are some of the issues that accountants could implement to fulfil Mr Leeper’s prediction that accountants could earn substantial fees from cashflow advice to replace the fees that the Australian Taxation Office is very confident accountants are going to lose from the ongoing changes being implemented by the ATO.
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