Excel News – July 2021

It’s July, there’s a nip in the air and winter has well and truly set in, as Australia deals with COVID outbreaks across several states. But July also marks the start of the new financial year, a good time to reflect on how far we have come since this time last year and to make plans for the year ahead.

As the financial year ended, there was plenty to celebrate on the economic front despite the continuing impact of COVID-19. Australia rebounded out of recession, with economic growth up 1.8% in March, the third consecutive quarterly rise. Interest rates remain at an historic low of 0.1% and inflation sits at just 1.1%, well below the Reserve Bank’s 2-3% target. Despite fears that global economic recovery will lead to higher inflation and interest rates, the Reserve has indicated rates will not rise until 2024 or annual wage growth reaches 3% (currently 1.5%).

I would like to say a big thank you to our team here at Excel. It’s been a difficult year with plenty of legislative changes, additional work helping our business clients with their JobKeeper obligations, and just dealing with the new systems we’ve introduced (or have been placed upon us) to deal with the ever changing Covid-19 environment. Despite this, we managed to grow our business, meet our budget targets, satisfy the ATO lodgement requirements, and get nearly all our work completed for clients in time. A MASSIVE EFFORT – THANK YOU LADIES.

I was really pleased we nearly made our target of 500,000 giving impacts linked to the work we do for clients during the financial year. We came up a little bit short (about 15,000) basically because we were unable to hold our annual client get-together due to the Covid restrictions – so we topped it up anyway. With your support we were able to provide 23,900 bricks to help build schools and provide 32,250 days access for school children in Cambodia, gave 163,520 days access to clean water to families in Ethiopia, provided 153,665 days worth of grain seeds to feed children in Malawi, and gave 128,896 days irrigation support to rural villages in Kenya.

I would also like to thank our clients – we have had to impose changes on how we deliver our services to you and you’ve all worked with us to get through these difficult times. Some of these changes have improved our productivity and turnaround times it takes to deliver our services and will remain a permanent system going forward.

While on the subject of change, both the accounting professional bodies and the Australian Securities & Investments Commission have mandated changes in our terms of engagement documentation effective from 1 July 2021, so over the next couple of weeks we will be sending new terms of engagement documents out to all our business and SMSF accounting clients, and our financial planning clients.

We are entering the new financial year with a strong pipeline of work, and would like to thank everyone who has referred new clients to us this year. Please keep it coming, as we would like to help as many people as possible build better futures for themselves and their families.

Until next time, stay well – keep safe.