FAQ

Below are our most frequently asked questions. Contact us if you have more questions or would like to discuss your specific needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Financial Controlling @ Anconsult?

Financial controlling @ Anconsult is your very own finance department. Data is processed instantly and you get reliable results within weeks, rather than months.

Financial controlling is the key to a healthy and profitable business. Tax compliance is a by-product when these two things work together effectively. To build a strong business that can withstand a turbulent marketplace, you must first build solid foundations

What are the differences between bookkeepers, accountants and financial controller?

It can be confusing to know who is right for what you need, because

  • not every bookkeeper is a BAS agent,
  • not every accountant is a tax agent,
  • not every tax agent is specialised in business/management accounting,
  • not every accountant service gives business advice and
  • not every accounting system is set up for financial controlling.

Bookkeepers
are recording financial transactions into bookkeeping software, including purchases, receipts, sales, and payments.

BAS Agents
are providing bookkeeping and BAS services for a  fee – including representing clients in dealings with the ATO about BAS obligations and ensuring compliance.

Tax Agents/Accountants
are specially trained accountants who prepare and lodge tax returns. They also give advice on tax liabilities and obligations, and can deal with the ATO on the organisation’s behalf. Tax Accountants focus on providing financial information to external stakeholders such as investors, creditors, and regulatory agencies, like the ATO.

Financial Controllers
are managing an organisation’s finances, and setting up and monitoring accounts systems that capture, analyse and report on the organisation’s financial information. They ensure that accounting records are kept appropriately, and reported results comply with accounting standards and relevant legislation.

Management Accountants
are preparing, analysing, and presenting financial information to help managers make informed business decisions. Management accounting is primarily concerned with providing information to internal stakeholders, such as company executives, department heads, and other managers.

How are you different from a bookkeeper or accountant?

We @Anconsult specialise in keeping your books in a way that your reports are relevant for YOUR business operations.

Every business is its own organism and therefore has individual needs and purposes. You can’t expect accounting software to know what it exactly is that you need to know right now unless the software has been tailored to your business.

Common solution to this problem is that business owners get showered with training offerings “How to read your business statements” – we @Anconsult believe that you should not need to do that!

We are preparing your books for your needs and you can read our reports without an accounting degree.

How long would this take to set up?

After initial consultation and a good look into your business it will take about a month to get you setup and onboarded into our program.

From then on you can lean back and focus on what you are doing best – running the operations of your business.

Is this an extra cost on top of my accounting and bookkeeping?

Financial Controlling @Anconsult will replace any bookkeeping that you are currently doing, but it will not increase your cost without adding significant value.

Our goal is that none of your costs should increase. In fact, you should ultimately save time and money on bookkeeping and accounting expenses because your whole financial system will run smoothly.

Do I need to fire my bookkeeper in order to work with you?

If you have a trusted bookkeeper or BAS agent you would like to keep working with, we can setup our systems and train them. They only need an open mindset for the advantages of management accounting or financial controlling to use our system to its purpose.

What about my accountant?

Financial controlling doesn’t replace your tax agent or accountant. Accountants usually have limited industry knowledge and will not be able to guide you on specific transactions.

We work within your business operations, tax agents look at your business from the outside – both very valuable and important!

What accounting software are you working with?

We work with whatever software you are comfortable with and sits in your price range.

If you need advice we will compare different packages and show you advantages and disadvantages but we will never work for ONE particular software company and make clients change over.

How does the reporting work?

Financial Controlling @Anconsult is a bookkeeping system that works with fortnightly accounting periods and will report after every period.

This means you will get a current report every two weeks 8 days after the end of period – that is near instant!

Why fortnightly?

After working in financial controlling for many years it turned out that the fortnight is the optimal period to reconcile and report on.

A monthly report will always be skewed and not comparable as business is usually not evenly distributed throughout a week and a month does not have an even amount of weeks.

Comparison week by week is often prepared by business owners but a very shot time span to report on. That’s why lots of bigger businesses started to report in 4-weeks/5-weeks-months, but this requires to decide every year when your “reporting month” starts and end. On top of that you still have four 5-weeks-months that you can’t compare to the eight 4-weeks-months.

Since most payrolls are run per fortnight we decided that the fortnight is the perfect reporting period for our purpose – long enough to make sense out of it and the most comparable for regular reporting.

Why are the reports that I have now not good enough?

Although we can’t comment on your particular reports without seeing them, most small business reports are reporting on expenses as they are spent – not as they are occurred.

For example, you pay your electricity bill every quarter. That does not mean that you have two months with low cost and one month with high cost – your cost should be evenly distributed over the year to create the right report that tells you if you are profitable or not.

If you have to go through your report and say “I made $5k profit but…..” your current report is most probably not good enough.

Where do I start?

Every business is different and every situation must be considered individually. Let’s start by having a chat to see if we’re the right fit for each other.

Contact us to find out more.

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