You can listen directly here. 

As business owners, it is crucial for us to know how to handle our finances well. In this episode, we will be talking about money and finances. Now is really an important time for us to be doing this.

 

Do you trust, know and really like your accountant? Victoria and Ros discuss the importance of the relationship with your accountant and bookkeeper plus how you need to remain in contact with these key partners in your business, especially when things are tight. 

 

Manage your business and manage your bank accounts! Victoria walks us through the “Profit First” Money management system. 

 

I’m certainly not a finance expert and there is no way I ever want to be, but I do know we need the right people in our corners to ensure we have solid foundations in our travel businesses and especially finance moving forward. 

 

I recommend you reach out to your accountant, ensure you are getting the entitlements you are eligible for and also check your cashflow. Ensure you are in a position to remain afloat in these uncertain circumstances. 

 

To ensure you are moving forward in your business and also getting any additional advice, tips and help, make sure you join the Achievers in Travel - Facebook group. Achievers in Travel - Accountability group. 

Show Transcription: 

Announcer: Welcome to Travel Agent Achievers! The place to learn how to grow your travel business and have fun with it. Join Roslyn and her guests as they walk you through proven steps to a fulfilling and profitable business. 

 

Ros: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Travel Agent Achievers. I'm Ros and I'm your host and today we have a very special guest.

We are talking about money and finances and I think now is a really important time for us to be doing this. We are recording this during COVID-19. And looking at our money and our expenses is really important because we don't know what the future will hold for us.

So I brought in an expert, Victoria Berry who is not only a good friend of mine, but she is an expert in this area. Victoria is the director of a company called HBA Encompass - Accounting, tax and business solutions in Queensland, Australia.

She founded the business in 2010. She is an agenda she calls herself zero and her experiences her knowledge and her know-how. But just breaking things down and telling us like it is really easily and really simply is one thing that I absolutely love about her.

So Victoria Berry, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. I am so glad you are here with us.

Awesome. Alright Victoria, thank you so much for joining us today. Could you please let our Travel Agent Achievers community know a little bit about yourself where you come from and what you do now?

Victoria: Okay, sure. So as was said, my name is Victoria Berry. I am an accountant, a bookkeeper and an author. I live on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but we service clients Australia wide.

So, as I mentioned, we have three businesses. The first one is HBA Encompass which is our accounting firm, where we service business clients. So, if you have business, whether it be a startup through to a multinational business, we can help with that.

We've got 12 people. So we're big enough to know most of the answers that you can have, but small enough to still know how our clients are on an individual basis, which means if you ring us, you're talking to a real person who knows who you are, which is really, really important.

Our bookkeeping business, Bookkeeper Hub. I started about five years ago because I got really sick of crowd information coming from people who were calling themselves bookkeepers. We utilize zero with this and a hundred percent zero, hundred percent cloud based.

And basically, we set it up because we figured there was a more cost-effective way for our clients to get their bookkeeping done, and to make it easier for them. So, we offer bookkeeping services. We offer bookkeeping training, zero training within that and within the realm of the bookkeeper hub sits another little side.

I don't know whether you call it a business or a service called Profit First, we'll get to in a sec. I'll come back to that. So then we have Zest For Success, which is the book that I wrote on starting businesses, because I really wanted to help people who were starting out and you can't afford accountants right to sit with me and pull the information out of my head at 350 bucks an hour.

So, I sat down and tried to mind dump all the stuff that I knew about starting businesses and running businesses, so that people who want to start businesses can get information and get their business up and running. It's something that's going to be worthwhile, not just go off on a tangent and start something with no real foundations.

Ros: Awesome. So that's called Zest for Success. And how do we get a copy of that?

Victoria: You can get it via Amazon. So, does with Kindle encrypt or you can go via our website, which is zest4success.com.au.  And I'm currently in the process of creating a training program to go with that. Make it easy for people.

Ros: Look at you girl. Not only do you have all of these different types of businesses, but you also give back to the charity cycle internationally on charity rides, you've got a family, you just don't stop.

Victoria: No, I don’t. I have three other teenage children, plus one four-legged friend. I am currently on the Supporter’s club board for the Maroochydore Surf Lifesaving Club and also the Finance Committee.

I'm a life member there so my charity routes run pretty deep and hobbies involved in Alexandra hypnosis puppies and even shaman they so we can pretty much take up with I think on top of everything else

Ros: That's right. We only live once. So, let's limit to a maximum and take what we can get and enjoy it to the fullest. Right?

Victoria: Definitely. And that's Yeah, getting to the beach is my happy place and it's how to relax.

Ros: You know what that's absolutely mine, too! I head to the beach. And I can just soak in. I used to live on the Northern Beaches of Sydney and whenever I returned from a trip so coming from the airport to the Northern Beaches, I would come around the headland and I could just smell the salty air and I would have this feeling like yes, I am home how good is this?

I love it. So, when we talk about money and finances like I know in business, this is probably one of the hardest things for small business owners to understand and get a grip of and really enjoy.

So, coming from an accountant, I know it's so easy to talk to you and you explain things really easily so that I can get it straight away. But what made you go into accounting? I mean, you just all numbers driven because I know that you just relate to everybody.

Victoria: It's a really good question and it's kind of sad. When I left school. I wanted to study on the Sunshine Coast and there was no University up here at the time. And QUT which is the Queensland University of Technology had a small campus in a tiny shed in Ningbo where there were lecture rooms or classrooms and they started with a library.

And they offered two subjects. All the courses where one was early childhood, and one was accounting for better business. And at the time, I hated kids and thought it was not for me. And I come from a family who were finance brokers.

So, it always grew up around business and being too, I suppose, dragged by default to a lot of meetings with Ted, we'd sign people up and talk to them. So, I think I had an inherent understanding of business. So, it seemed like a no brainer to go into accounting.

Ros: I think that anybody who is a teacher is just incredible. When we've experienced lockdown, we're recording this during the recovery period that the experiencing lockdown and having to teach a child as well as run a business is a challenge. So, hats off to you for having three of them because I'm only managing one right now. Just crazy.

So, let's talk a little bit about business and accounting and finance for small businesses. When somebody is choosing a bookkeeper or choosing an accountant, what are the sorts of things that firstly, we should look out for? What sort of questions should we ask an accountant?

Victoria: So, you really want to find someone that you relate to. You want to be able to trust this person, you want to be able to ring them at any time and ask them a question. I think it's a given these days that accountants have accounting skills and bookkeepers book keepers.

Ros: These are two separate things that are two separate things, is that right?

Victoria: Right.  So, bookkeepers, in particular, have to be registered as a bass agent, which means that they must have done a certificate in bookkeeping, and they must have done 1000 hours of supervised work, not sure about the exact number of hours.

But what that means is that someone who was hanging up their shingle to be a bookkeeper must have qualifications and must have experience. So, you've kind of got to take that on face value that they know what they're doing.

So, asking them about these skills probably isn't going to let you have their best foot in. The best at asking them, what they do, how they do it, and how they prefer to work with clients. It's really important. Yeah, some businesses want someone to come out on site to sit in their office and to deal with all their paperwork and, and deal with all the bookkeeping.

And people are happy to look at. Suppose the more technology focused where it's off site, which is what we do, where we get people to utilize cloud apps to, to suck the information from their bills and to reconcile the clients without being at the client's premises.

And somebody we chose that path because we found it was cheaper paper. It’s cheaper for us and it’s also cheaper for the client.  We don't have to travel between client appointments. And it also means that we can have staff anyway to be able to help us.

So how they are going to work with you is really important and it depends on, I think, whatever type of technology as well. We try and make it as simple as we can for people. People grab the phone. It's got a little app there called receipt bank; you take a picture of your bill. It sucks up to receipt bank calls all the information out and then our bookkeepers coded.

Once we're happy that the same thing happens all the time what perhaps Telstra goes to telephone, BP goes to fuel then we can automate that process which again cuts down the time spent in bookkeeping.

 

And that probably leads me to my pet hate about bookkeepers who charge by the hour and that works with accountants as well, that if you're paying someone by the hour, you're paying for their inefficiency.

So, what we do is we quote upfront, and we say, depending on the number of transactions that you have come through your bank accounts per month, we have certain fees. If we get it done quicker, that's our win. If we take more time, it's our loss. Because you shouldn't be paying for me to be sitting there. Not really thinking about my job or just being slow. You want someone who's going to get in, get it done and get it sorted. So upfront pricing is something that's really close to me. And I think it's a fair way to deal with people.

Ros: I like the transparency of that. And having a small business like we are monitoring all costs, and particularly now being in travel where we're really having to understand everything that's going out about business and all the different expenses.

So, to have an accountant and a bookkeeper, that is transparent in their own costs is a huge bonus for us right now. And I applaud you on that. And I think that that's a great way to move forward. Because it just takes away into hidden angst and anxiety. And it's just showing, you know, your integrity as well. But as you say, there's inefficiency on your ends, and you lose if you guys are efficient, and you win.

And I think that's fair in all cases. Same with us.  And what about an accountant? So, what should we look for with an accountant?

Victoria: Similar in a way to bookkeepers, you want to find someone who talks to you in a way that you can understand. So, you don't want someone who's going to be sitting up on their high horse and talking down to you.

You want someone that can make things as easy to understand that goes through and explains the steps in any process that you have to do and you also need to go back to those same questions that we asked, which is how do you expect us to work with you.

So, it may be paper based, it may be email based, it may be more technological based with portals and apps and that kind of stuff. Now, your accountant will work with your bookkeeper, if you have one, which is really, really important because you want them to be talking to each other and talking on the same page.

Now, it's really easy for me to say that when I've got bookkeeping clients that we do the accounting for, we have hidden clients we don't do accounting for we have accounting clients; we don't do bookkeeping.

 

So, it's not necessarily you have to have us do everything. Because some people are grateful because they don't need a bookkeeper. If you have a good bookkeeper, I'm not going to force you to change. I'm not going to ask you to change systems.

Zero is my preference. But if you have something that's working like QuickBooks or something like that, we're not going to ask you to change because Zero is not necessarily right for everyone.

So, your accountant must be willing to work with more than one program and not demand that you change to meet their criteria.

Ros: Yeah. How often do you think a small business owner should they be talking to their accountant?

Victoria: That depends. It really depends on what they want. So, at this time, at the moment, as you said, we're, we're talking in COVID times, we're trying to reach out to our clients and catch up with them fairly quarterly.

Some clients we catch up with monthly, particularly the ones that we're doing bookkeeping claims for, but now is the time to be looking at your business cash flows, your business health and how you're going to manage going forward because we don't know what's going to happen.

And that's obviously a slip to the travel industry. And it's really a matter of looking at pulling out your crystal ball from under your desk and looking at a few scenarios and going, Okay. If we open up in six weeks and things start coming back where our cash flow is going to be, if it doesn't open up in six weeks, and it takes three months, what have we got? How are we going to manage? And then adding on to that perhaps some more?

What if so, crystal balls regarding international travel and what's going to happen there because obviously not having that big hole in any travel business inside that Australian tourism is trying to boost themselves and get the most that they can. But we all know everyone loves to travel internationally.

Ros: I have some incredible places here in Australia. We are very lucky. We've got such diversity, but yes, that's right. Like we do, I know that you love to travel overseas that is special, but it's also an opportunity, like people are getting a bit of cabin fever and like want to cry, but, you know, we just stick with what we can do right now.

Victoria: So really how often you talk to your accountant depends on your own circumstances. We have some clients that just want their tax returns done year end, and don't want to talk to us in between. and as accountants, I'd rather talk to my clients on a regular basis, because I think that I can help them.

But some people think that they have everything under control, and if that's what suits them, well, that's fine. But in saying that accountants have other skills apart from filling out tax forms, and that's what's really important. I think when you're looking at an accountant, you don't want someone who is just a straight number cruncher.

Anyone can fill in the text form. It's not really that difficult. There is some obviously, ease of learning, tax law is behind it. But being able to look at a business and help a business grow, maintain thrive, looking at exit strategies, looking at potential management buyouts, there's all kinds of stuff that accountants can help with, that aren't strike tax.

Ros: And that's something that, as a small business owner, we don't necessarily know or understand. Because accountants, that's how you go to get your text on, you don't necessarily understand or know all of these extra skills that an accountant has.

So, I appreciate you actually mentioning all of those, because that's really important for a small business owner to know that it's more of a partnership and a relationship between the accountant and the business owner to say, well, let's look at some forward planning here. Let's see where you want to go. In 12 months, two years, are you looking at buying a house?

Are you looking at selling your business and working together to come up with a plan to make sure that those things are achievable, if possible?

Victoria: That's exactly right. We do a lot of planning and we work five or three years ahead, work out where people want to be personally, and then how that relates to what they need out of their business. And then we work backwards to what we need to do with the business to get the outcome. That's, that's, that's the really interesting stuff about being an accountant.

Ros: I really love that as well that, like, I'm really big on accountability. And I'm really big on having people that challenge me as well in my business.

So, I'm loving hearing from you to say, well, we work backwards, and he's three years. And he's five years ahead, but this is what you need to do back here in order to get there. And for me, I see that as a challenge. I'm like, right? Well, if that's the goal that I want to achieve, Victorians just told me that I need to be doing x, y and z.

So that's what I'm going to aim for. And that's what I'll do. So, I love that it can be a partnership there as well with working towards some long-term goals. Thank you for that.

Now, I want to come to something that I know you're very passionate about. You and I were at a conference last weekend and heard an incredible speaker, Mike Michalowicz and he told me about these books and his theories but this is something that I want you to talk to us about and its Profit First. What is Profit First?

Victoria: Okay. Profit first is something that traditional accountants do. It sounds like I would definitely say you need to manage your business by looking at your financial statements that you look at your profit and loss as to how you've gone and then you look at your balance sheet to see where the money is what's coming in what's going out.

But that doesn't work for everyone. And Mike Michalowicz is an amazing author who basically breaks down business ideas into something that's understandable for everyone. And that's what I love about it.

So, profit first is a system of managing your business or managing your bank accounts and traditional accountants say you can't do that, you need to look at your debtors and look at your creditors.

The reality is, most people look at their bank account, open it up and go, Okay, I've got 10 grands today, I can pay these bills. Yes, I can't pay these bills and panic, how am I going to do it?

Ros: And how am I going to myself?

Victoria: Yeah, and yourself. So, profit first is a system of managing that. But most important, the key is in the name. So, profit first means that you're taking the profit out of the business first, then leaving the balance to pay your expenses.

And that's a real flip around on traditional accounting. Yes, normal accounting says sales minus expenses equals profit. Correct. And then from there, you can pay yourself. Yeah.

Now the reality is that if you're not managing those expenses, then you can get things called expense cripple scope. And profit indoors away. And as a business owner you're scrimping and saving and going, why am I not getting ahead?

Ros: That's an argument that we have in our household quite often.

Victoria: It is. and profit first also helps you. Weather the ups and downs in the business cycle because some businesses are traditionally busier at different times of year. So perhaps you've restaurants and cafes are really busy at Christmas time where they've got lots of tourists around, but in the winter months, they drop off.

On the flip side, ski resorts are really busy in the winter months and not so busy in summer except for the crazy mountain bikers freaking out any time of the year. Always good down here.

So, profit first allows you to manage those ebbs and flows of businesses. So, what is it? It's a system of working out percentages. So, Mike has got percentages there that have been scrutinized by his team in the US to work out for the size of the business, what percentages should be allocated.

So, there's basically four allocations when money comes into your bank account. There is an allocation to profit, which is your reward for being the business owner. So, it's like a dividend from your business the same as if you own shares in bhp.

You would expect dividends a couple of times a year, but your profit account, dividend account, and you only touch it for MC right and there is your tax account. So, you're putting money aside for income tax for you and for your business.

Then you have your wages account, which is your wages, your income, and that's your remuneration for working in the business. The same as if you had a staff member during your role and then the fifth account is your expense account. And that is where all your bills get paid right from.

So, each, Mike suggests each fortnight. In Australia, I suggest each week, whether it be a Wednesday or a Monday you work out whatever suits you. You go into your bank account, you allocate the money that's sitting there into those other four bank accounts, to be able to be used for the uses, basically, taking your main bank account down to know, then you pay your bills out of your expense account, you allocate wages to you.

And then the tax gets paid on a quarterly basis and profit gets paid. But what it means is that when you have good months, you get more money in your tax account, more money in your profit account and more money in your expense account.

And that's where you have to be really diligent that you don't go ripping money out of these accounts and it's hard particularly when you start when you may not have enough money in your expense account to pay something. And that's when you've got to work out, okay? Have I got to cut my expenses to get more sales?

But if we let that money build up their expense account when we have a lean month, and we still have standard running costs, like rent or car repayments, then it should be an offer sitting in their bank account to pay for them.

So that all loads of the amount that's going into the four accounts for that month is less because of the buffer. You've still got money there to pay those to pay your tax to pay you. That’s the whole theory behind it. You need to talk to a profit first professional to work out what percentages are relevant for your business.

Ros: Yeah, I think that's the big thing is talking to a professional to ensure that you set things up correctly at the start, because I know that some people will be thinking oh, that's okay. I'll just set up a few different bank accounts and stop transferring money around.

But I agree having a professional to work with and somebody who understands the profit first method like yourself, you're able to structure things so that it relates specifically to your own business. For the long term like that's the whole point, right is to ensure that there are profits in the business to pay you a dividend in the long term.

Victoria: That's exactly right. And, I mean, Mike has written a book called profit first, and it's a great read. And I'm not discouraging people from reading. If you read it, and then you talk to a professional, you have a much deeper understanding of, of what we're trying to say.

The real trick is in the percentage allocations and also in kind of like the business planning, we're talking about accounting before that we are okay, we draw a line the same here. We want to move to something, but it's got to be a gradual move.

We can't just look at a business that isn't making minimal profit. I want you to pay 50% to the business owner. It's just not going to work, you're going to end up with no money, and it ends up more stress than what you were. And it might be, you know what, let's put 3% away for this quarter. And here we go. Next quarter, let's make it 5%. And you gradually tweak those percentages until you get to where you need to be.

Ros: So, is this something that even when times are tough, so like now, you can implement still?

Victoria: Definitely. And when times are tough, the percentages that are going to your profit account, your tax account, and maybe even your wages account will be lower than what they would be in a normal time, whatever the new normal is, but we look back 6 months ago or 12 months ago, the percentages that we will implement and will be totally different to what we're implementing now that we've got to take into account.

You know, what you do you have fixed expenses, you don't have as much money coming in. Let's have a look at it. Let's see what we can do, what we can streamline, what we have to do to get more money in their door or other ways of getting revenue in, and then looking at those percentages, but even if it's just 1% put away, it's 1%. It's something which is better than zero.

Ros: Absolutely. And just keeping on moving forward. And I'm getting more and more excited by the day hearing about Profit First and how it works and getting it set up like this is music to my ears, and particularly just wanting to understand more around finance.

 And now we've got the opportunity and the time, particularly in the travel industry to be looking at all of these things.

One thing that I've spoken to the Travel Agent Achiever community over the last few months was cash flow forecasting. And back in February and March, I started talking about it then and said to everybody, hey, guys, we could be in for a really tough run here.

Start looking at your expenses now putting together some sort of forecasting so that you can be prepared for three months down the track six months down the track, and I've run mine through to December, cut back on expenses and negotiated things wherever I possibly could.

So, is that something that you also help your clients with in the forecasting side of things, particularly during times like now?

Victoria: Yeah, definitely. And talk about things called three-way forecast. That sounds really confusing. Yeah. But what they do is it looks at your projections of your profit, also your income less your expenses to get a profit figure. Yeah, but then it also looks at where that profit figure goes after that.

So that means that we look at things like making sure that we've got money aside for staff, PAYG staff, super Income Tax loan repayments, all those kinds of things. So it takes what's coming out of a straight, I suppose a budget of income and expenses that then takes into account the other things that are in there as well also takes into account in some businesses, which is probably relevant to the travel agencies the time it takes you to get paid for something.

So, if you're getting paid a commission, and you know, they pay you 15 days after the end of the month, we need to factor into the bank account when it's going to hit you.

Can we count this look, let me go smoothly, but a profit of 10 grand should be 10 grand sitting in the bank account? You know what? Half of it might come in for a month and a half. So, we need to have a look at how that affects our bank balances.

So, sitting down with a good bookkeeper or accountant, most bookkeepers don't really play in the cash play space, but there are some that are definitely at that level. I can sit down and we can do those predictions of the cash flow right out. We can go as far as two years.

But I mean that all depends on the inputs as well. So, the assumptions that you're making of what income is going to come in and when it's going to come in. And that takes a bit of a thumb sucker a crystal ball.

But I can also look at it and take a few assumptions and play out what we call what if scenario, right? Okay, what if sales increase by this amount, or they decrease by this amount or they stay city or they kick in in three months or six months and they can be tweaked and you can have a look at a range of scenarios.

So that as things happen, you can go, okay, this is where I think I'm going to be. But you've got to look at the worst-case scenario as a basis and go, well, Holy moly, you know what? No one's going any Way, Victoria is in lockdown.

So, I've got a travel agency in Victoria, apart from people sitting at home trying to plan for when they can get it out as they're getting cabin fever. I'm pretty well stuck on what's happening at the moment.

So, you've got to look at that worst case scenario and go, okay, the next six months, or six weeks of these expenses, but no income, and then take it out from there.

Ros: Yeah, and I think that's the big thing is just looking at everything right now and assessing where you're at. And if you are in lockdown, and you aren't able to do anything, then minimize your expenses wherever possible and just look at how you are going to make it through the next period of time.

And for us exactly what you said before about the commission. So, I know in our business we've been working on a number of groups, but 18 months before COVID here, and then as soon as it did hit, we then gone wow, that is, you know, 12-18 months’ worth of work that we're now not going to get paid for.

But we may not even see that money for another 18 months yet, because if people can't travel now and they're not traveling this year, but they're postponing it for another 12 months, we are in trouble, like what can we do right now.

So, I love that we are able to look at and assess and really minimize the expenses, draw everything back in, but work on what we can do. And that's the importance of having a good accountant and somebody that you can relate to, as you say and talk to you and just go, this is where things are at, like what can I do, and but also in having a good business coach and a good mentor that can strategize and bring in other ideas as well.

So, I know that you talk people through a lot of financial things, but you're also part of a business group as well as am I and then we can, you know, collaborate and really work on different things and strategies for everybody as well. So, I appreciate your input on that.

Victoria: That's exactly right. And a good mentor and a good business coach or advisor was a good accountant. Accountants can help you with some of the coaching space. Different business coaches have different sexualities depending on whether it's systems or people or headspace, and that kind of stuff. accountabilities, the main thing.

And when you're talking about looking at projections going forward, having someone to be that little devil that sitting on the shoulder and asking you the questions when you say, well, I think that's going to come in next month. It's like, well, really, are you sure about this? And really doing that and making sure that what you're looking at is real.

Ros: That's one of the things that I love about the travel agent community and particularly with Travel Agent Achievers that I've set up is that we Have that accountability with each other and we are able to ask those hard questions and I know I'm challenging a few people at the moment are And what are you working on your business where we can't necessarily work in it right now.

Victoria: And probably yes, it is having the time now to work on your business and look at your planning going forward is invaluable as well. Yeah.

Ros: So it's looking at everything I we look at customer journey we look at clients we look at marketing and sales that I have, as I said, right up really important is looking at your finances having the right accountant, having a great bookkeeper, somebody that knows you understands you, and that's where I'm really appreciative of you and your experience and sharing some of that today with us because it is absolute gold, Victoria, thank you.

Oh dear, technology. It hasn't been my friend today. But nevermind. We'll keep moving on. Victoria, thank you so much for your input today telling us a bit about profit.

First, I think it's a great concept and I think as travel agents and small business owners, we need to understand our finances a whole lot more. If somebody needs help with their accounting or wants some extra advice and input, where can they find you?

Victoria: The easiest way to find me is I'm on Facebook. I'm also on LinkedIn, email [email protected], for the bookkeeping side, or [email protected] or you can always call the office on 0754 447094

Ros: Thank you so much for that and giving out your personal details as well. That's amazing. You do realize this goes global.

And so, with that with all of your expertise, we really appreciate you. If people want to find out more about Victoria Berry, her experience, expertise and HEA encompass and Bookkeeper Hub, we will have details and all those links in our show notes as well.

So, make sure you go there. Check it all out, speak to Victoria, she is a gem, she'll be able to break it down in easy to understand ways and formats for you.

Thank you so much for your time today. Victoria. I really appreciate it. And I know that we will continue to work together in the future as well. So, thank you.

Victoria: Thank you Ros, I'm sure we will continue to work together in the future.