COVID-19 – How to Contact Us

Here at Spencer Accountants, we are taking Coronavirus (COVID-19) very seriously and our first priority is the safety of you, your family and our team. Accordingly we are ensuring additional precautions are being taken in the office to reduce any risk of illness to both our team and clients.

At this stage, we are operating business as usual, however we are closely monitoring the situation, and have introduced measures to limit any exposure including social distancing, utilising technology and encouraging our clients to send in (rather than physically visit us) their tax information where possible to assist us to complete their compliance obligations.
 
There are a number of ways you can send in your paperwork, including:

• Email – admin@spencerfinancial.com.au
• Mail – PO Box 114, Thornlie WA 6986
• Online – Client Portal
• Phone Appointment – For advisory requirements and individual tax return appointments (Have your documents ready to take photos to SMS/Email us if required)

We have had for some time electronic signing facilities to allow us to lodge personal and business tax returns as well as business activity statements on your behalf. If you haven’t already, shortly, you will receive an invitation to our Client Portal which is an easy to use feature directly connected to our system that allows you to securely download, sign-off and upload data files and documents with us. We would strongly encourage you to start using this feature moving forward.

For those on cloud based accounting software (MYOB, Xero & Quickbooks), there are mechanism’s in each software allowing you to take photo’s of your expenses and attach them to transactions and/or create transactions based on their character recognition technology. These are generally in the form of Apps such as:

• MYOB – Capture App/Email to Intray or AccountRight or Essentials Online for attachments
• Quickbooks – App for snaps, or Quickbooks Online for attachments
• Xero – App for snaps, or Xero Online for attachments

The more of your records you attach your expense receipts/invoices to, the more accurate your books and records are likely to be, and in times such as these, it is worth investigating these functions that you are already paying for as part of your software subscriptions. It is a great opportunity to ease your record keeping requirements by having everything in the one place and allows us to investigate any queries we may have without further input from yourselves.
 
If you require any additional information on these, please contact our in house Bookkeeper, Richard at our office.
 
At this stage we are still able to accept drop offs and can complete a normal appointment if required, however if you have recently returned from overseas or are displaying any respiratory symptoms please let our team know before coming into the office to arrange an alternative.

We will update you if this changes.
 
You may also be aware that the government has also announced some COVID-19 stimulus measures for small business, including:

Support for Business Investment:

• Instant asset write off threshold increased to $150,000 and
• An additional 50% depreciation bonus as an investment incentive
• These measures were effective from 12 March 2020

Cashflow Assistance for Business:

• Tax Free PAYG Discounts for the period 1 January 2020 – 30 June 2020 (minimum $2,000 and maximum $25,000) for those businesses that employ staff. This would be an automatic reduction/refund based on your BAS lodgement for the March BAS and your April, May & June BAS/IAS
• Apprentice subsidies of 50% of the apprentice or trainees wage for up to 9months (01/01/2020 – 30/09/2020) up to a maximum $7,000 a quarter/apprentice for those business who keep or take on Apprentices (maximum $21,000/apprentice).
• These are yet to pass through parliament and further details are pending on the mechanics and requirements

Stimulus payments for households:

• $750 tax free payment to pensioners, social security, veteran and other income support recipients and eligible concession cardholders
• These will be from 31 March 2020

Once these measures regarding COVID-19 are passed by parliament and become law, more details will come to light and we will provide these to you.

We thank you for your ongoing support, and we will provide you with any updates as they occur.

Kind Regards

Greg Piotrowski
Director – Spencer Accountants

For the latest COVID-19 news, updates and advice from government agencies across Australia visit www.australia.gov.au