Firmer forecasts, better compliance, happier employees? How Planday could be saving you stress and money.

From July 1, 2023, a key thing happened for small businesses that manage employees covered by a modern award: base rates went up by 5.75%. Add this obligation into your already complex workload of managing staff hours, leave entitlements, tax responsibilities and super payments (which are now 11%!), and your bookkeeping for small business woes may be feeling more like chaos than calm.

Here’s where Planday can help. 

Xero’s recently rolled-out employee management tool is designed to take away the headache of managing your greatest asset: your people, with solutions for everything from payroll to rosters to employee communications.

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed with the human side of what you do, here are four scenarios where Planday might be right for you.

You have complex staffing arrangements

In addition to base award rates increasing, so too did the National Minimum Wage (up 8.6%, to $23.23 per hour for a full-time employee). 

With many business owners taking advantage of gig economy workers – including casuals and contractors – alongside their part and full-time headcount, there’s a lot of work in adjusting not only the base award itself, but also the rate that each individual worker should be on.

Planday eases this burden with cloud-based digitisation – even down to allowing you to assign an hourly wage to each employee so that the right penalty and overtime rates are applied at the right time. This is especially critical if you have different people working different times, and at different pay scales. 

Plus, the ability to manage rosters (goodbye Excel spreadsheets), track the time your workers clock in and out, and even log their break times as part of Xero’s basic setup means that the admin burden is taken off of you, and ultimately leaves less room for error. 

Remember, heavy penalties can apply when bookkeeping for small business and not doing this correctly. Yes, even if it’s an accident.

Your busyness could lead to non-compliance

When it comes to the number one fear we see in bookkeeping for small business consulting, non-compliance absolutely tops the list – and it’s a valid concern. 

After all, if 37% of small businesses cite that they’re worried of making payroll mistakes, it must be happening with some frequency. We’re big believers that there’s no reason not to streamline activities and be online, but of course it has to be done correctly. 

Planday is designed to keep the tax auditor well away, and ensure that everything is ship shape in the backend – think correct leave accrual, the right superannuation paid, and accurate tax reported from gross to net. At a granular level, Planday even ensures you’re lodging employee expenses correctly in your chart of accounts, and that all timesheets stay in one place, with a clear data trail to support you.

You’re bleeding money unnecessarily

The age old saying ‘when you know better, you do better’ rings especially true when it comes down to understanding your bookkeeping for small business numbers. 

This makes Planday’s direct integration with Xero Payroll a crystal clear way to get a real-time picture of your data – for example, your labour costs versus key operating metrics, like revenue (extra win: you can even plug in your actual POS system for more accuracy on this).

This sort of powerful forecasting is designed to allow you to look ahead and optimize your workflow, with reports across everything from payroll to schedule, staff monitoring, cost and working time rules. 

Imagine being able to take a strategic birds’ eye view of where your current setup is inefficient – for example the wrong staff member working at the wrong time – and easily readjust to save you money?

Plus, with having bookkeeping agents like us across this system, we can help provide additional guidance on how to manage operations for peak cost efficiency. Remember, if this insight optimizes even half an hour of one employee’s wages, that’s your membership paid for already. Win, win, win.

The experience of your people matters to you

Here’s a hard truth that might be tough to hear: employees get annoyed with clunky onboarding and technical systems. Looking after your people and making their life easier has never been more important, and is especially critical if you’ve got great people you want to hold onto.

Planday in conjunction with Xero Me gives your people ownership and visibility over their own employment, and minimizes the need for input from some random accounts person who doesn’t know them from a bar of soap. Businesses that give their staff their own logins, access to their own timesheets, and allows them to submit their own availability and leave requests will reap the rewards of this.

All manager approval comes through to Xero, so it’s purely a way for team members to own some of this process, so that you don’t have to – even down to in-app messaging capability that will allow them to swap shifts and keep up with news announcements.

So, if your bookkeeping for small business woes are stacking up – ask yourself: could Planday be right for you?