From 1st July 2012, businesses in the building and construction industry need to report the total payments they make to each contractor for building and construction services each year. The ATO wants this in the form of a taxable payments annual report.

The aim is to improve compliance with tax obligations and to change the practices of those contractors who are not doing the right thing.

Your business needs to report if you:

• are in the building and construction industry
• make payments to contractors for building and construction services, and
• have an Australian Business Number (ABN).

You are considered to be part of the building and construction industry if:

• 50% or more of your business activities in the current financial year relates to building and construction services.
• 50% or more of your business income in the current financial year is derived from providing building and construction services.
• 50% or more of your business income in the past financial year is derived from providing building and construction services.

The details to report will generally be contained in the invoices you receive from your contractors.

The first annual report is due 21 July 2013 for payments made in the 2012–13 financial year. In this first year businesses that lodge their business activity statements quarterly may lodge by 28 July 2013.

The information reported about payments made to contractors will be matched against other information held by the ATO to detect contractors who have not:

• lodged tax returns, or
• included all their income in returns that have been lodged.

Building and construction services include any of the activities listed below if they are performed on, or in relation to, any part of a building, structure, works, surface or sub-surface:

Do not report

• Payments for materials only, such as building supplies and materials.
• Unpaid invoices as at 30 June each year. For example, if you receive an invoice in June 2012, but you do not pay that invoice until July 2012, you report that payment in the 2012-13 Taxable payments annual report.
• Pay as you go withholding payments.

For more information about taxable payments reporting visit

ato.gov.au/taxablepaymentsreporting to find details such as:

• A list of activities and occupations that are considered to be building and construction services.
• Examples of situations where reporting is required.
• Exclusions from reporting requirements.
• How to register to participate in an online seminar from your home or business.

This article is provided by MYOB in their “newsCAP” issue 7 dated 9th Aug 2012.

Have a look at this article on Kochie’s Business Builder.

Thank you to … Klay Lamprell 04.08.09

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com.au/Article/IsABookkeeperALuxury

Hiring a bookkeeper can be tricky, especially if bookkeeping is something you don’t really understand. As with any recruitment process, you base your decision on qualifications, references, length of experience and personality. Knowledge of your particular industry can be a bonus but it’s not necessary. A highly experienced, well-qualified bookkeeper will ask the right questions and learn quickly.

You might pay more, but it can be worthwhile using a bookkeeping company rather than a sole operator. A bookkeeping company will have a few bookkeepers on staff, should conduct regular reviews of its bookkeepers’ work, should ensure their bookkeepers are up to date on all tax office rulings and software changes and will be able to supply a fill-in should your regular bookkeeper take leave for any reason.

The lowest-cost option for getting your BAS prepared and keeping basic financial records is for a bookkeeper to work directly from your bank statements. You note which are business and which are personal expenses, and the bookkeeper will enter and code the information. Some companies offer packaged fees for this, so the costs are set and there are no surprises. With this option, you can still get the regular reports that businesses benefit from, such as profit and loss and cashflow reports, as well as end-of-year reports for the accountant, which may make your tax returns less expensive.

Whichever style of bookkeeping service you choose, knowing that your financial records are being kept accurately and that you’re doing everything right as far as the tax office is concerned will give you peace of mind. More than that, the time you used to spend dancing clumsily around ATO deadlines can now be spent catching up on industry developments, training staff and, most importantly, growing your business

When people arrive at your office, they are not generally wondering what your desk looks like but they may be impressed if you have a particularly fashionable coffee table. The same applies to your website: some designers and developers sacrifice all forms of usability and practicality to produce something visually appealing.

However, just like an expensive coffee table, that visual appeal could cost you, in more ways than you might expect.

Page load time has a dramatic effect on how many people immediately leave your site without looking. This is referred to as your bounce rate.

Your site is competing for attention with a plethora of others. If your page takes too long to load, many potential customers won’t stick around; why wait when there are pages of Google results to be explored? If your site takes eight seconds to load, you can kiss goodbye a good 30% of your traffic. Just as running late for a job interview is suicide, page load times must be a priority. If you are still using a splash screen, start up video or music on your site, you are probably still wearing socks with sandals and collecting audio cassettes; beyond help.

This all seems very basic, but here’s the thing no-one is talking about: Google Adwords will charge you more if your landing page is slow to load. Page loading times are now integrated into your keyword-quality score.

And here’s the kicker: Google decides, by its own rules, if it thinks your page loads too slowly. It still delivers the click, but decides to charge more for the right. The longer the page takes to load, the higher the Cost per Click (CPC) will be.

Google added this feature in April 2008 with the rationale that a high-quality landing page will have a fast load time and feature unique quality content. However, it does not publish guidelines and keeps the permutations that make up the quality score a secret. Has anyone told the designers or developers?

One of our clients recently had a promotion and changed its landing page to a graphical page that took longer to load. While the new landing page was up, we saw a dramatic increase in CPC from 33 cents to 70 cents and a drop in positioning from 3.1 to 6.2.

Once the promo finished and the landing page went back to normal, the figures reversed.

Is this fair? Hell no!

Google has changed. It no longer offers a fair, market-driven open-auction as the method of establishing CPC. Instead, it now actively pushes up pricing of CPC as a desperate means to increase revenue. Google’s brave new world is paved with keyword minimums and quality scores. This technology seems to be plagued with anomalies and examples that just don’t add up.

We have many examples of keywords that have 4.72% click through rates and some with high conversion rates, but Google has applied a low quality score. Minimum keywords push prices up from 30 cents to $1.30 or even higher, even when there are no other active bidders. How much is this really costing businesses? Is this the great Google rip off? Please explain!

My advice: slow and steady won’t win this race. Make sure your landing page for paid search is a quickie.

Stephen Murphy is head of search at payperclick.net.au