Those Curly HR Questions Finally Answered!

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Small Business, Solutions.

Guest Blog – The team at Chapman Employment Relations have put together this handy list of Curly HR Questions and Answers that small business owners often come across. If you want to know more, you can get in touch with the team at Chapman Employment Relations here.

Q1. Amy has been overpaid $800 in her last pay. She spent it but now payroll have said they will be deducting it from her next pay. She complains to you that it is unfair. What do you tell her? !

A: The full amount has to be deducted. She shouldn’t have spent it and should have raised it with you when she saw that her pay was different.
B: She can agree with payroll how much is deducted and it can be over several weeks if she’s spent it all.
C: An employer has the right to deduct a full overpayment in the pay-run following the overpayment.
D: If it hasn’t been advised in writing, then no deduction can be made.

Answer: B is fairest. While C is legally correct, it might not considered good faith. Deductions should always be put in writing so there is no confusion.

Q2. With the changes to rest breaks, Amy has had someone in her team ask if he can move his tea breaks to the end of the day so he can leave 30 minutes early. Amy asks if this is okay. What do you tell her?

A: The time allocated for rest breaks under the ERA is 10 minutes per break, so he could only leave 20 minutes earlier.
B: The company can provide a longer break so could allow the employee to leave 30 minutes early (15 minutes per break).
C: Tea breaks are now provided as per your company policy. If you can’t provide them (e.g. sole charge role) only then can they be moved.
D: If tea breaks aren’t provided, employees must be compensated for it instead

Answer: This is a curly one. Breaks should be by mutual agreement but if agreement can’t be reached, Amy’s company can decide on timing. Compensating for breaks can only occur if the company can’t provide breaks – it’s not an employee’s decision. So the only answer that’s not right is A, as there are no timings listed in the ERA anymore!

Q3. One of Amy’s team, Paul, has resigned and is leaving on 27 March. He has 3 weeks annual leave which would take him through to 17 April, so he’s arguing because Easter falls in that time, he should also get paid an extra 2 days for Easter on top of the 3 weeks annual leave. Which answer is correct?

A: Because Paul is starting a new job on Monday 30 March, he will be employed by the new company over Easter and the new company will need to pay for the 2 public holidays.
B: He won’t get Easter public holidays from either company as he’ll be too new.
C: He’s actually right. As his AL takes him past Easter (even though you are paying it out) he should get Easter paid by both of you.
D: He should only get the Easter stats once so can choose which company should cover them.

Answer: C is correct. This is a strange loophole in the Holidays Act.

Q4. Amy has got a university intern working in her team for 3 months. He understands that they are not an employee as the ERA defines an employee as someone being rewarded for their work – and the intern is unpaid. But the intern has asked what happens with ACC. Which answer is correct?

A: Because the intern is in a workplace, if they had an accident it would be work related and Amy’s company would have to pay the first week.
B: If the intern had an accident while in the workplace, because they are not an employee it would be a personal injury.
C: They wouldn’t be covered by ACC at all.
D: It would be a work injury however they would get no paid sick leave as they are not an employee.

Answer: B is correct. The intern will be covered but as a personal injury so ACC will kick in week 2.

Self-employed parental leave entitlement
In October 2013 Cathryn Grey and her husband assumed care of a baby they were adopting. Ms Grey had stopped working as a self-employed educator a few months before to prepare. However in mid-October, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment told Ms Grey that she wasn’t eligible for paid parent leave.
Under the Parental Leave Act a person must have been self-employed for at least an average of 10 hours a week over the preceding six or 12 months. MBIE took that to mean you must have worked every week however the ERA have ruled that as she had worked an average of 10 hours a week for the last 12 months, she was eligible.

Quick test: Does the same apply for employees?

Answer: Employees have to have worked every week, but if you’re self-employed the average applies.

Fee Funders – Innovative Client Payment Solutions

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Business Growth, Cloud Software, Small Business, Solutions.

Meet Fiona Ashford – or Fi – from Fee Funders. Fee Funders take all the stress out of business by giving your customers a spread payment option while paying cash to your business in advance. And what is best is that they are free for Business Owners. We interviewed Fi to find out more about her too-good-to-be-true service.

So Fi, how does Fee Funders work?
Fee Funders provide a win/win for the cash-flow of businesses and their customers by allowing the business to offer customers a spread payment solution.

The business receives 100% of customer invoice paid to them, whilst their customer spreads payment over 3, 6 or 9 months. This means the business achieves upfront cash-flow at no cost. Fee Funders manage all the payments via direct debit. Their customer pays a competitive flat interest rate of 1.85% per instalment + a $65 set up fee. And the business owner is paid 5 days after we receive the first customer payment.

It’s quick, easy and fabulous for the cash-flow of businesses and their customers. We also pride ourselves in being exceptionally friendly and efficient to deal with and funding applications are online taking only minutes to generate.

What clients do you work with?
Our financial products assist companies such as Accountants, Goods Suppliers, Signage, Web, IT Services, Dentists, Engineers, Coaches, Entertainment providers, Health and Safety Companies, and multiple other industries.

Basically we can help any business who’s fee’s/invoices to their customers are between $2,000-$25,000 and who would like a way to offer spread payments while still getting paid up front.

There are only a handful of fee funding companies in NZ. Fee Funders is the ONLY one who extends our services beyond the accountancy and legal professions.

What is the number one benefit clients get from using you?
Definitely Cash-flow.

Cash-flow is critical for any business – regardless of size or industry. Chasing payments is time consuming and costly. When your customers pay through Fee Funders you know that you’ll be paid. As you can imagine, the accounts staff love us because we make their job so easy and reduce their workload!

Increased sales is the 2nd best benefit. Our clients tell us that they sell more by having the option to spread payments.

You have an app! Tell us about that.
Yes – we like to make it easy for our Clients and so a mobile i-phone app that quickly works out the repayment amounts is something that many of them use in the sales process. We also have a great online “quick quote” app that’s available to our clients which shows installment and interest charges for amounts and payment terms.

It only takes about 2 minutes for a business to generate the funding application and Direct Debit confirmation online -it’s that quick and easy!

If you could give one piece of advice to business owners, what would it be?
Make it easy for your customers to pay you!

What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Other than getting the kids to schools on time, have you ever met someone who just so obviously LOVES their job? – I’m lucky enough to be one of those people.

I love our clients. I love our product. I love the solution we provide and the lives it changes. I feel very blessed to be in this position.

I also love the continual financial up skilling I get from learning about our other specific financial products we have available through www.fundersgroup.co.nz.

If you think you could do with better cash flow options for your business, you have nothing to lose for contacting Fi at fiona@feefunders.co.nz or free phone 0800 333 729.

www.feefunders.co.nz

20 Free Business Software for Small Businesses and Start-Ups

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Small Business, Startups.

Budget planning is essential to start-up and small business success. Making the most of the available free resources is a great way of keeping your costs under control – check out our top 20 free software! (more…)

Xero Add-on Focus: Deputy

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Cloud Software, Small Business, Solutions, Startups.

This online business software is putting an end to staff roster issues and endless hours of administration. We recently caught up with Kristin from the Deputy team to tell us more about their cool system.

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Top 5 Businesses of the Month – May in Birkenhead

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Small Business, Startups.

The Birkenhead community impressed us so much that we’ve dedicated this month’s blog to this hotspot. Park the car and explore Birkenhead by foot.

1. Lovenotes

I met Manda before I met Lovenotes, and got an instant feel for the goodness and substance this company brings to the community. Do you know it takes 10 litres of water to recycle 1 sheet of waste paper? Manda and the team at Lovenotes combat this by creating beautiful stationary for you from your one-sided, used (non-confidential) scrap paper. There is something uplifting about writing on orderly scrap paper. With a pay as you go system, I have signed up. It is fun, inexpensive (from $135) and one box of scrap paper makes 50-80 notebooks for you to keep! Whether you are a business owner or serial printer, Lovenotes is a win-win.

2. Crave

This is one of those stores you could spend an hour in. Winner of the Giftware and Homeware category for the Auckland Top Shop Awards in 2012, this wonderfully quirky, colourful and well-curated store will be a one-stop shop for all your gifting needs. Sidekick have been personalising their referral giftslately and I would definitely see happy faces from our vibrant referees with gifts from here. Crave have a great selection of clocks, cushions and crockery, 100% a go-to for birthday shopping if you haven’t found the perfect gift yet.

3. Dappa Dogs

For all your dog grooming needs, Dappa Dogs will have you covered. Known for their bright orange store and team of National Master-Certified Groomers, your dog will be well looked after whether you want a trim or a full-on salon spa treatment for your pooch. This is the place for you if only the best will do.

4. Bloom

As a sucker for cupcakes, Bloom makes the cut with yummy handmade cupcakes for all occasions. They have many designs to knock your socks off, including Berry Lamington, Rasberry Tart, and Nutella Caramel. This is a dainty stop-over suited to a catch up with your best friend, or to take some cupcakes home for a home-hosted high tea.

5. Coffee General

Coffee is the life-source of busy workers like us, so it is good to know where to get a good one. I have been to Coffee General time and time again and they have never disappointed. As the coffee connoisseurs of Birkenhead, Coffee General made it in Metro Magazines Top 50 Café’s in Auckland in 2013. This small coffee shop provides a cosy dwelling for meetings or is nice for some peace and quiet to rejuvenate before the day begins.

How to Keep Investors on Your Side

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Business Growth, Cloud Software, Contractors, Small Business, Solutions, Startups.

This is a featured Blog from our friends at SeederBoard.


Raising funds for any business is notoriously difficult. Any number of factors can slow things down or get in the way, preventing you from taking your business to the next level.

Once you have completed endless elevator pitches, a frantic search for due diligence paperwork, then working out a fair term sheet, you might finally close the fundraising round. (more…)

Good News for Small Business Owners

By . Posted in Business Growth, Small Business, Solutions, Startups.

Good News, Everyone!

According to this leading Business Index report, the small business output in Q1 of this year reached it’s highest point since 2008. They state “Small and medium-sized businesses in the UK enjoyed the strongest level of activity, year-on-year, for six years.” Essentially this means small businesses are performing better than they have in years.

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The Friendly Takapuna Store Manager

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Small Business, Solutions.

The friendly Takapuna Store Manager, meet Garth!

Meet Garth, BNZ Takapuna’s new Store Manager. He is one of the guys at BNZ that will help you to set your business up right the first time by getting you in front of the specialists. Sidekick can honestly say that we love Garth. Not only does he bring passion and enthusiasm to everyone he meets, but he also looks for the best way to genuinely help the business owners that he interacts with. There aren’t many banking managers that are as proactive and caring as he.
Having grown up in Taupo, Garth fits in with the friendly North Shore atmosphere perfectly. We ask him a few questions about his position, and of how BNZ looks after its customers.

So Garth:

What is your role at BNZ?

I am the store manager in the Takapuna store. I lead a team of 7 banking specialists and 7 front line skilled service experts. I upskill and look for success with my team around our customers and the service they offer to our community, whilst having fun.

What do you believe is something businesses could be doing better?

Up-skilling themselves through the new technology that is out there these days and asking others around them how to be “great”.

How does BNZ help business owners achieve their financial goals?

To help our customers achieve what it is THEY want is our great ability to have strong conversations. Each customer is unique, to make our customers great and successful we have to be able to listen and make recommendations based on what we know about our clients, their situations, and where they want to be. I base myself on being there each step of your journey to become “GREAT” and along this journey BNZ help by pointing you in the direction of professionals to help you grow.
We have specialists who have been business owners, who are trained and qualified to understand what it is like out there in the wider community and market. We are not “just another bank” like you, we are unique.
I live by what BNZ is all about “helping our customers being good with their money”.

What is one of the best tools BNZ have to help their customers?

It would have to be our AWESOME Payclip. As a small business this is designed for keeping your accounts in the green with solid cash flow- you can collect money on the job, and therefore have more freedom to grow. What is it you love about your job?
I love helping. Having that first meeting with a client finding out what makes them tick and where they are wanting to be and wanting to do and setting that plan to get them there is my buzz. Seeing the success for people around me is what I love about my job.

Is there something you really enjoy doing in your spare time?

I am all about the balance. Work and home, so in my spare time I like to exercise at the gym prior to work and then after is my social time with family & friends.

If you would like Garth to help your business, please contact him on 021 834 776 or 09 488 1712, or on garth_reid@bnz.co.nz.

Choosing a Cloud Application – Guest Blog – Link Solutions

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Business Growth, Cloud Software, Small Business, Solutions, Startups.

No matter what background you’re from, you went in to business to do what you love. Not to spend your time on admin. Reuben Sweeney from Link Solutions talks about what your cool, new-age business needs to consider before choosing the cloud software you think will save you time and money.

It’s tempting sometimes to feel like we’ve reached a higher plane of existence with the rise and prevalence of cloud-based business applications built around the Xero ecosystem. You’ll hear it called The New Economy in comparison to the ‘old’ way we used to do business. Globally New Zealand businesses are pioneering the use and development of cloud-based business applications. New Zealand is consistently at the top of the global list for ease of starting a business and thanks to products like Xero, Unleashed, WorkflowMax, Vend and GeoOp it’s easier than it ever has been to start your business globally with competitive systems, lower overheads and less risk. With over 380 add-ons, the Xero ecosystem is busy with industry-specific niche applications that will do 90% of what you need them to do all for a small monthly fee.

In the next five years we’ll continue to see the number of applications available increase but some of the slower names disappear. It’s important when researching cloud apps for your business that you consider not just what the product can do for you (feature/functional fit) but where the product is going, what are their priorities, what is being worked on and how often is it being released? It’s easy to fall into the trap of picking one app over another because one will do 92% of what you need it to when the other only does 91%. It’s easy because that’s the way we used to select business applications back when the platform choice was for life and the apps were static. In a cloud environment it’s not the strong that dominate the weak but the adaptable that will dominate the static.

For the first time as users we’re able to cheaply and easily retrieve business information from our cloud-based business applications and have the minimum expectation that the information is live, timely, mobile and accurate. That’s awesome for a lot of things like planning, forecasting and decision making. These apps are allowing our businesses to act and react quicker than our competitors and quicker than we ever have been able to in the past. That’s just the beginning. These are first-generation apps that will quickly become a minimum standard. We’re already starting to see the emergence of the second generation of apps from companies like Unleashed and Vend. In the new new economy (which it will no doubt be named) it won’t be enough for an app to simply input, organise and regurgitate/dashboard business information to users. They will need to be smarter because the user expectation will shift from demanding information at our fingertips to demanding only relevant, actionable information about our businesses.

The apps that survive the transition (and have already started) into the 2nd generation aren’t the apps that are fighting for the last 10% of function or fit, or the apps that are going beyond and delivering features and functions you didn’t know your business needed. They will be the apps that bring you as a user and based on your user role (organisational roles) relevant, actionable information specific to your identity. Imagine a world where like an individually tailored newspaper bites of relevant, targeted information are headlined, distributed and announced throughout your business. Instead of a retailer asking ‘what sales have we done today?’, logging into their Vend from Costa Rica and finding out they’ll receive a headline like ‘You’ve sold more of product range X in the last week than you have sold to date’. Wow. The difference is subtle but deep. One is starting to tell a story, asking you questions of you and the other is giving you an answer.

We’re seeing the start of this transition in products like Vend where instead of saying ‘What do I need to order for my store?’ you can have one staff member draft a stock order based on your minimum stock order quantities for each product, have a manager edit and approve it and have an email order automagically delivered straight to the relevant supplier. A product like Unleashed lets you achieve a similar result but for a warehouse. ‘What do I need to order?’ become ‘What’s in my Low Stock Alerts?’. A product like WorkflowMax turns the question from ‘How close am I to budget for this project task?’ to ‘These are the project tasks approaching budget with X% remaining’. This subtle change in questioning will define those applications that survive the transition into the 2nd Generation of cloud based business applications. Think about what 2nd Generation business applications might look like as you think about what apps might suit your business.

Save yourself hours of app research by calling Link Solutions on 0800 159 672 or emailing contact@linksolutions.co.nz



Reuben Sweeney 021 774 413 reuben@linksolutions.co.nz

Top Tips For Tradies

By aucklandnorth. Posted in Business Growth, Cloud Software, Contractors, Events, Small Business, Solutions, Startups.

Sidekick’s National Powered Up Businesses Roadshow brought together hundreds of trades people that wanted a better, easier way to manage their trade business.

We spoke to Andy Burrows from Trades Coach after the event to compare ideas of where trades businesses struggle.(Link to his fantastic blog).

Three issues that we both found important were: Cash flow, time and cost management-especially for multiple jobs, and blowing the budget.

1. Cash flow

After a long project is over and you have finally been paid, looking at your bank balance can feel great! But if you are a tradie that looks at the $70,000 then thinks you’ve got enough cash for a new ute, you are not working your cash flow correctly.

But firstly how well collecting your payments? And if you aren’t getting paid on time, do you know exactly who owes you what?

Options: Payclip– BNZ have a device that plugs in to your smartphone to collect payments for small jobs right then and there. So if you did great work on your maintenance call out and the owner is home, why not get the money now?

Xero: With Xero your debtors are automatically loaded into a projected graph on your Xero dashboard, once you send your invoice off. This means you not only can see in advance when you are due a big pay week, but you can also see which invoices are overdue for payment/who to chase up. Send an invoice from your mobile on the job too, you could charge them for it but it will only take a minute or two.

Now, on top of all of this you need to figure out how much of that money is yours to keep, and how much you need to keep your business growing smoothly and your suppliers paid. Trade businesses have fluctuating income so prepare yourself and make your profits where you can, which leads me to issue two and three.

2.Time and cost management for multiple sites, long hours.

So no brainer, you were busy working on the job, and what time did you finish that job last Tuesday again? It can feel like a chore doing your paperwork which might make you put it off, throw it in the direction of your wife, or get sick of it real quick.

This is especially for trades that have multiple small jobs to do like maintenance or plumbing. How are your job quoting systems? Are your staff measuring their time well?

Training your staff and subbies alongside a good system means accurate and quick quoting for your staff, and faster payments. You are also teaching your staff good management, which could benefit them in their trade future. You can learn it together.

GeoOp– It’s quite good if you have an admin lady that answers calls and delegates jobs. She can type the job out as she receives them, and drag and drop them (on the computer) to the staff, who get text alerted with all the details. For the lucky tradie that’s nearest or almost finished, a mobile GPS will lead them to their next job.

With GeoOp, you can utilise your staff’s time and increase your turnover, which means you or your admin can think about marketing, fliers, and getting the guys to drop them in a few nearby mailboxes. Ah, carrying on, but last thing-its integration with Xero pushes invoices, bills and receipts through to the front desk so there’s no double entry. There’s so much to cover, so you may as well utilise a free half hour demo- Vanessa on 021 278 1798 can get you one.

3. Back costing and budget blow outs

Back costing helps you estimate your profit properly. You deserve to make a profit for the work that you do, so charge out accordingly. Once you get in to the habit of back costing you can see how far off you are from your job estimates, and your quotes will adjust to your expectations. At the PUB, about 1/3 of tradies back-costed, so there’s lots of room for improvement.

Do you know how to set your budgets? Shaun our CA is passionate about budgeting for success, and will give you a free consultation to talk about how you are setting yours. Call him on 021 644 547. Andy Burrows trades coach blog if you want to check it out.

Thanks for meeting us at the PUB!