There is no minimum period of time an employee has to be employed to become entitled to a public holiday and it does not make a difference if an employee is classed as casual, part time or full time.

All employees would be entitled to be paid for a public holiday if the public holiday falls on a day that would have been an otherwise working day for the employee. This means, but for the day being a public holiday the employee would have worked on day concerned. In other words, if it was not a public holiday, would the employee have been working on that day? If the answer is yes, they would be entitled to have the day off on pay; if the answer is no, they are not entitled to observe the public holiday.

What is an employee’s entitlement if they work on a public holiday?

Under the Holidays Act 2003, if an employee works on a public holiday, the minimum payment they should receive is time and half for the hours worked on the public holiday. For example, if an employee normally works 8 hours a day, but on a public holiday they only work 2 hours, the minimum payment they would receive for the day would be 2 hours at time and a half. This applies to all employees – wage and salary earners alike. Therefore, if the employer asks the employee to work on a public holiday, they should act in good faith and explain how this entitlement works to the employee so that they are aware of what they are agreeing to.
If the public holiday the employee worked on fell on a day that the employee would otherwise have worked even if it was not a public holiday, they would be entitled to an alternative holiday (a day off on pay at another time) regardless of how many hours they worked on the public holiday.
An employer can only require an employee to work on a public holiday if it is written into the employee’s employment agreement and the public holiday falls on a normal working day for the employee. In all other circumstances, the employer would require the employee’s agreement to work on a public holiday.

If I work a shift that spans two days, what are my public holiday entitlements?

Generally it is accepted that a public holiday runs from midnight to midnight. Therefore, if an employee works on any part of that calendar day (that is a public holiday) they are entitled to time and a half for the time worked on the day, and an alternative holiday (if the day the public holiday falls on would otherwise be a working day for the employee).

As an alternate option to the measures described above the Holidays Act 2003 allows employees working shifts that span two days to transfer the public holiday, by agreement with their employer, so that the public holiday covers one whole shift. The ‘day’ a public holiday is transferred to must be a period of 24 hours that begins or ends on the actual public holiday and includes the whole of a shift the employee is due to work.

When is an employee entitled to an alternative holiday?

Under the Holidays Act 2003 an employee is entitled to an alternative holiday if they work on a public holiday that is an otherwise working day for them. For example, if an employee normally works Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and they work for 1 hour on Easter Monday, they would be entitled to a full day off on pay at another time (an alternative holiday). This is because Easter Monday is an otherwise working day for them. This provision includes employees working shifts and some employees on call. Both types of employees get the full day off, even if they only work for a small part of the day.

There is no entitlement to an alternative holiday where an employee:

• Works on a public holiday and that day would not otherwise be a working day, or
• is on call on a public holiday but is not required to restrict activities, or
• is only employed to work on public holidays.

What should an employee get paid for an alternative holiday?

An employee receives their relevant daily pay or average daily pay for the day taken as the alternative holiday. Payment for an alternative holiday, depends on when the employee takes the day off, it has no bearing on how many hours the employee actually worked on the public holiday.

The alternative holiday can be taken at any time mutually agreeable to the employer and the employee.  If the employer and employee cannot agree when the alternative holiday is to be taken, the employer may determine the date. The employer must have a reasonable basis for choosing when it is to be taken. The employer must give the employee at least 14 days’ notice of the requirement to take the alternative holiday.

If an employee does not take their alternative holiday within 12 months of becoming entitled to the alternative holiday, the employee and employer can agree for the alternative holiday to be exchanged for payment. In this instance, the payment for the alternative holiday is to be agreed between the employer and employee and must be paid as soon as practicable once the agreement has been made.

Alternative holidays do not expire, therefore, any alternative holidays that are outstanding when an employee’s employment ends, these are paid at the employee’s relevant daily pay, or average daily pay if applicable, for their last day of work.

Source: NZ Department of Labour Frequently asked questions

The festive season is the busiest time of the year for many businesses, but it can also be really challenging.

The retail and tourism sectors are set to ring to the tune of jingling tills. But renovators and hairdressers will also be busy with last-minute makeovers, and mechanics servicing or fixing cars in time for holiday trips.

The rush is already starting for some firms and, with just weeks until Christmas, owners need to prepare now to seize the opportunity. There are also special challenges amid the festive cheer, including managing stock, staff, and cash flow through big peaks and troughs in demand, while providing for holiday pay and the provisional tax bill due for many in mid-January.

Here are some tips to make it a festive season for your business:

Get planning

Planning is the key to maximising sales.

Stock up to sustain your business into the New Year. Many suppliers shut down over Christmas; double-check your stock will be delivered when you need it.

Brush up on customer service. Holidays and Christmas shopping are stressful for many people. Support your staff by offering customer service refresher training, and revisit your disputes resolution and customer credit policies.

Maximise staff resources for the spike in demand. Write a Christmas roster. Consider hiring temporary staff. You could offer extra hours over the New Year period to cover staff leave and holidays.

Gear up for sales

If your turnover rises, you’ll want to maximise sales while managing demand and supply. Here are some proven ways to boost sales:

Make it easy to buy from you. Customers will want speed and convenience. Consider expanding hours over the festive season, offering flexible payment options, and posting special offers on your website. If your site doesn’t show up-to-date contact details, opening hours, and a good description of what you offer, fix that now!

Pull in new customers. Regular customers are great, but new ones can become new regulars. Think about improving your business signage, designs, and logo; offer free or reduced-rate shipping for online sales; or after-sales support, such as three free services when you sell a bike.

New products or services.  Think about your product range. Do you mainly sell big ticket items, or do you stock a range of products for a variety of budgets? You could boost sales by bundling bigger items with accessories at a discount. For example, if selling smart phones you might offer a screen protector, case and car charger at a discounted rate.

Manage cashflow

The holidays can be a cash flow rollercoaster. Sales often peak with the merriment, followed by a hangover as revenue slows in the New Year. Think about the seasonal effect on your turnover and costs, and manage your cash flow carefully. Last year’s figures should give an idea. Put together a cash flow forecast to help manage your spending.

Use the downtime

If you hit a New Year slowdown, don’t despair. At other times you probably crave time to put back into your business. While customers are away, use downtime to plan for repairs, renovations or makeovers. Think about planning, product development or future development. But also allow time to put your feet up – you deserve a rest and it’ll help recharge your batteries for another busy year!

Source: http://nzbusiness.co.nz/

Your time is best spent on growing your business and doing what you do best.

Making the most of your time and energy has never been more important. Cloud based programs that can be integrated together to create one seamless system give you more of both while managing the nitty-gritty of your business.

Our philosophy at Accounting One is that owning or running a business should be enjoyable.

Your bookkeeping, debt collecting, scheduling, customer details, can all be managed using remote technology so that your smartphone or tablet becomes an office that you can hold in the palm of your hand.

Xero
Manage your accounts, invoices and payroll with ease and convenience.
Xero combines everything you need for your accounting and payroll in one simple, easy to use program. With Xero you have the power to print and email instant invoices and quotes on the spot and even have the ability to have clients sign off on contracts and jobs on your tablet or smart device. Track your business performance, create budgets and create reports to assist with financial forecasting.

Receipt Bank
Eliminates the folder of crumpled up receipts and invoices by allowing you to upload a photo of the document from your smartphone or tablet while you’re on the run or you can copy and paste from emails for your paperless accounts. Receipt Bank extracts the key information from your bills, receipts and invoices, removing the need for manual data entry. Receipt Bank can then publish the data to your accounting software or it can be downloaded as a spreadsheet or used to create expense reports.

WorkflowMax
A client relationship and job management tool which includes timesheets, reporting, project tracking, invoicing and job monitoring. Track leads, proposals and sales to ensure your sales team are performing at their peak. Compare estimated and actual costs of jobs and keep account of the time your team spends on each job.

Debtor Daddy
Identifies invoices coming due for payment, or those that are overdue according to your accounting software, and automatically sends reminder emails to clients. You are able to set the frequency for sending the reminders and customise the emails to show the invoice details you want, including payment terms and payment options to remove any roadblocks in getting paid.

Timely
Timely is an appointment and booking management system. Organise your business, team & clients and save time with online bookings, automated reminders & daily administration tasks. Integrates with Xero so your client database is readily accessible. Not only will it help keep you and your team on schedule, but you can also keep track of client’s special days such as birthdays and send them a personalised message.

Accounting One is the best point of contact to help you use all this information to your advantage. As business operators and/or owners, it gives everyone vital insights into what’s working – great, you can keep doing that or what’s not working – let’s change or stop that immediately.

For more advice on setting up systems to help you grow your business and enhance your business performance contact Accounting One today for a complimentary Cloud Consultation.

What does it take to succeed? It takes more than you think to survive and thrive and running your own business is not for the faint hearted. After the initial excitement starts to diminish, business owners swiftly realise that for survival you need to build great relationships, solid teams, systems and processes.

Teamwork, Discipline & Accountability

Like any goal you set, you need someone to hold you accountable. Good accountants are like good personal trainers. They are there to help you with goal setting – working on your ideal “weight”, they’re there to assign “exercises” and they are there to measure results.

To grow in business you need discipline and direction to help you set objectives and goals, and most importantly, be held accountable. How else do you measure success? It’s one thing to hand over your financials; it’s another when you have a team to work alongside you picking up on what’s going wrong, what’s going right and then helping you do something about it.

Opportunities are everywhere but if you’re not focused and you’re not disciplined to stay on track, it’s easy to lose your way. With good accountants, not only do you get sound advice and support, you get fresh business ideas. These fresh business ideas could relate to new products or services you could offer, it could advise you about your organisational structure and a whole range of options to address. There is no one size fits all so it pays to listen to the experts.

Good accountants, like the team at Accounting One, having years of experience around systems, processes and ideas. Walking into a business growth consultation is half therapy and half business planning. Plenty of friends and family will have ideas – you can guarantee that, but if they’re not based on realistic data – you’re really just wishing your ideas work.

Accountants, who are also your financial mentors, understand the day-to-day running of a business and how to drive successful outcomes. They have the capability and the access to ensure your business will thrive. Yes, there is number crunching involved, but that number crunching is appraising your business performance. Without it, you’re really blind.

Financial Mentoring? – How We Pay It Forward

Mentoring businesses is sharing business wisdom and the Accounting One team says it’s the perfect opportunity for them to “pay it forward”. This approach enables them to help businesses map direction, set goals, develop influential networks and relationships. This is key in any successful business whether you are as big as Google or as small as a sole trader.  You never know where collaboration and collective thinking can take you so it pays to listen and listen to the right people.

Don’t go it alone in business, being “mentorless” is not nice. What is the most challenging question about your business growth you have on your mind? Write it down and then ask us at Accounting One.

The works rolling in, the boys are busy but why is the cash flow still not improving? You’ve won a few big jobs lately but the profits were really tight, where does it all go? What happens when I am hit with a bad debt just when I’m about to pay my subbies?

These are real problems that those in the building trade are asking every day. There is so much hype around at the moment with the building trade taking off but risk is always there when it comes to running and owning your own business. Dealing with that risk is a top priority.

According to a recent article in the NZ Herald your business is most at risk when it is going through a growth “spurt”.

“Unfortunately people don’t understand the cashflow demands of a growing business. It’s when you’re actually most at risk,” Specialist Trade Contractors Federation president Graham Burke told the Herald recently.
That’s because if a firm is growing and a debtor doesn’t pay, it has higher wage or supply costs to deal with but no cash to pay. “When you’re growing you need cashflow in advance, it’s when people come into grief. It’s kind of the reverse of what people think – when it slows down your cashflow catches up for a while,” he said.

It’s important through all phases of your business from start up to exit planning to have good people and good systems. Good accounting systems rely on good accountants who can translate your financial statements to help identify areas that need action. It could be a review of margins and costings or it could be wages and expense analysis.

Money management reports will tell an accountant what jobs are making money or if your margins are too squeezed. They are qualified to tell you what jobs are profitable, they can help you improve cash flow and offer sound strategic advice. It’s the solid foundation that will keep your business running.

Reporting on objectives and goals can be achieved in real time and you don’t have to trawl back over messy and unreadable paper work to try and work out a) how long did we really spend on that job b) was that job profitable or did we actually lose on that one c) what jobs pay the best and therefore which jobs should I target.

It’s imperative to work with great people and great systems if you want to keep your head above water and get ahead. We know health and safety talks a lot about – eliminate, isolate and minimise. When it comes to making money you need to apply the same to eliminate any risk to your business.

Management buy-outs are a great opportunity for a senior management team to become part owners of a business, but each shareholder will have their own set of goals.  It’s vital that a succession plan is put in place very early on in the game to create transparency and trust.

It’s easy to identify those shareholders who have one eye on the business and the other on the door!  They are the quick thinkers, possibly the more risk taking members of the group, who may want to buy up, merge and acquire at a faster pace than the other members are happy to do.

Those other members probably see themselves as long-term “employees” of the business, as well as shareholders.  They like job security that part business ownership gives them.  There is no right or wrong, though cracks can occur when a power struggle starts to take place.

For succession planning in this situation to be a success, a likely recommendation is to pull in an independent third party or parties to act as advisories.  The aim is to ensure both parties achieve a beneficial outcome that they are all happy with.  For those who want to build and sell up and get out, having independent advisors negotiate and facilitate the process allows for a smoother transition period.

For those who wish to stay on board, then advisors can assist with capital management and strategic planning to allow for the continuity of the business. Even for those who want to stay in the business it’s key to identify early on strong managers who can at some point take on greater responsibility.  Training and development for these managers is a wise investment for any sustainable and profitable business.

Succession planning isn’t just an exit strategy it can also be a time to grow and develop a business, so staff, shareholders and customers all get the best deal.  Whether you want to retire or just move on to something new, the only way to successfully achieve this is to plan ahead.

To allow for a smooth transition, succession planning needs a strategy and sooner than most people think.

First of all you have to identify what succession planning looks like to you. What is your vision in 2, 3 or 5 years time for you and your business? Do you want more free time but still remain hands on in your business? Do you want to completely let go in 5 years time and try something completely new, with a nice padding of capital in your back pocket?

Whether thinking of moving out or moving people up, you need a plan.

Whether you are in a family business, a small business or part of a larger shareholder group, it’s important to set clear objectives and goals for the future. We tend to get caught up in the focus of constantly increasing profit, building revenue, and improving cashflow but at some stage it’s important to take time out and look a bit further ahead.

If you are after more freedom, what are you happy to let go of? Who can you trust will carry on the baton and ensure the business still thrives? Who in your senior management team has the skills and leadership qualities to take on more responsibility or to help you grow your business? Those people in your team may be the future shareholders in your business and if you want your legacy and integrity to stay in your business, choose wisely.

Thankfully, there are professionals who can assist and support business owners with succession planning. It’s a fantastic tool that allows business owners to gain vital insights and look at different opportunities for growth that they may not have explored. What does the future hold for you and you business? Succession planning is planning for success.

A business strategy is a way to generate successful business ideas and sustain growth.

A business strategy starts with gaining a sense of purpose. When we understand the WHY in business we can create a clearer vision or sense of direction, for self and the whole company. Everyone knows in business you can’t accurately predict the future, but you can visualise what your future growth looks like to you.

Success comes in all shapes and sizes – breaking into new markets, increasing revenue by x %, building a strong leadership team or designing an exit plan are just some examples. A business strategy helps you identify the steps you need to take towards your future success.

Increasing profit and maximising revenues can come from looking at new opportunities and identifying new threats. These new opportunities come from inspiring people, helping them be better prepared to evolve and grow.

The actions can be anything from on going training and development to KPIs and objectives. Having these actions in place facilitates effective decision making, helping the business pay close attention to what is going on around them.

Luis Gallardo, writer of Brands and Rousers: the Holistic System to Foster Businesses, Brands and Careers wrote, “To be precise there are six R’s that, when used together, help businesses achieve their objective of sustained, gainful growth: Reason, Revenues, Rouse, Reputation, Relationships and Resilience”

Progressive accounting works with the six R’s. Progressive accountants are masters of business strategy. Increasing revenue is driven by purpose, planning, inspiring and connecting. We’re on a mission to helping business and people grow and succeed.

Adopting new cloud technologies and online tools is a big piece of the puzzle in a business development strategy. We can communicate online at any time of the day or night, if we have the right systems and applications running effectively. It’s an efficient way to do national and global business. You can provide smart solutions quicker and with less fuss.

Advanced technologies are now having a major impact on how we work. Cloud technology allows people to work remotely anywhere in the world, at anytime of the day. Advanced technologies have inspired people to come up with new ideas and new opportunities. It’s important to remember that the only way to capitalise on the new way; is to not be afraid of it. Adapting to change and adopting technology needs to be balanced with growing a strong team culture to drive a successful business strategy.

Online marketing and social media continue to develop positive relationships, if you have a communications strategy to drive successful initiatives. It’s more than just about promoting business in the online world, it’s about promoting good people. Traditionally that always came in the annual review but now smarter businesses can reward and recognise their team by publicly announcing what a great job they do.

When prospective new clients want to do business with you, they go online to check you out – to find out what sort of people you are, and what sort of people you work with. They might have read your vision and mission statement but now they want to make sure you walk the talk. In real time they now have the opportunity to do so.

Developing a successful business strategy takes into account powerful relationships, internally and externally. The holistic approach with a focus on “we are all connected” is how advanced technologies are making their biggest impact. Progressive accountants promote this new way of connecting as a way to motivate, inspire and connect with others, so they can reach their full potential.